CITY’S COMPOSTING PLANT PICKS UP NATIONAL AWARD
Facility that was designed by Stantec is the largest of its kind in the country
The Calgary Composting Facility, which opened in July, has already garnered recognition, earning the Silver Award for Infrastructure by the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships 2017 Awards for Innovation and Excellence.
It’s a huge pat on the back for the city and Chinook Resource Management Group, a 50/50 partnership between Bird Construction and Maple Reinders that built the facility. It hired Stantec for all design services and is now operated by AIM Environmental Group.
The first composting facility to be built in Canada through a P3 and the largest of its kind in the country has already become a benchmark for future composting facilities across North America.
Stantec architects and engineers were tasked with producing high-quality compost by treating the food and yard waste from the green cart program, and from dewatered biosolids from city waste water treatment plants.
“At Stantec, our goal is to deliver projects with the biggest community impact we can, and this project certainly does that,” says project architect Todd Hartley.
The result is three buildings totalling 500,000 square feet that accept compostable material from 320,000 singlefamily homes and process it into 100,000 tonnes of top quality compost annually.
After green bins arrive, the waste is shredded then transferred to 18, 170-foot-long vessels for 21 days, where it is turned, mixed and churned every five days to stimulate decomposition.
It is then transferred to a curing building and screened to remove undesirables such as plastic and rocks, then sits for another 28 days, during which air is sucked out through a perforated floor slab to enhance the decay process and reduce odour.
Waste ammonium sulphate is collected, neutralized and boiled, converting the waste acid into a crystallized form that is a valuable soil fertilizer.
The state-of-the-art, energy and water efficient process is expected to save 40 million litres of potable water per year and reduce waste in landfills by half.
Advantages of recycling waste into compost are being shared with students in an education area with a classroom, observation mezzanine and adjacent outdoor learning garden.
Hartley added, “The city’s new compost facility creates a significant diversion of landfill waste and generates a highquality, marketable product. We are proud of our accomplishment here — a big win for the city, the environment and the parties involved in delivering a worldclass facility.”
It is a major completion, but Stantec’s architecture practice has also been busy with other interesting projects.
The architectural and interior design divisions were responsible for the Tastemarket by SAIT that recently opened in the Barclay Centre as the institute’s second downtown culinary campus.
It was built to offer a postdiploma culinary entrepreneurship certificate program to help students learn about the challenges of opening their own businesses.
The public is invited into classrooms to enjoy traditional, authentic eats.
Stantec designed stations for five different crafts: a deli bar, a woodstone flatbread oven, grab-and-go sandwich market, patisserie and wine cellar. There is also plenty of seating in a restaurant-style setting where the public can interact with students and instructors in culinary classes, and which can also be rented for events.
Bow Valley College is another institution where Stantec is providing a restacking of the existing spaces that are already crowded, taking into consideration what will be required over the next 10 to 20 years.
NOTES: Calgary philanthropist Leslie Bissett has made a major gift of $5 million to Hull Services to construct a new building at the organization’s main campus at Anderson Road and Woodpark Boulevard S.W. Replacing an existing facility, it will be the new site for the Preadolescent Treatment Program (PTP) serving children between six and 12 years. Bissett says she has volunteered for the PTP program for a number of years and has been able to see first-hand the need for this program. Hull Services executive director George Ghitan says, “Her generous gift elevates PTP to yet another level of excellence and stands out as an example of what a concerned private citizen can achieve in our community.”