KNOW? DID YOU

• Edmonton’s river valley was once the primary source for aggregate to help build Edmonton. Hawrelak Park was a gravel pit. • A typical single-family house uses about 160 tonnes (that’s about 12 truck loads) of gravel. You’ll find it beneath the basement floor, as drainage rock around the foundation to prevent flooding, in the concrete walls, floors, steps, sidewalk, patio and driveway. Even your home’s windows and stucco siding are made with sand! • Construction of the Father Michael Troy School in Edmonton, completed in 2003, required 29,000 tonnes of aggregate. Aggregate is needed for the concrete walls, floors, sidewalks, parking areas and any mortar work. • In one year, Alberta uses enough aggregate to build a wall around the entire province (that’s 3,990 km), measuring 3.8 metres (12.5 ft) high by 1 metre (3.3 ft) thick! • Construction of a tall office tower uses more than 100,000 tonnes of aggregate, mainly in the concrete. • Gravel mining is a necessary but temporary use of land. You may also be surprised to learn that many of Alberta’s golf courses, lakes, and parks, were once aggregate mining sites. • In the U.S., every American uses 1.37 million pounds of gravel in their lifetime. We as Canadians are actually considerably higher, roughly 50 per cent higher. ( We have a much lower population density so we are further apart, but we still have to build the road to get to Joe’s house). Albertans use roughly 14 tonnes per year (every year) for each man, woman and child in the province. • Once a site is taken over by residential or commercial development, even the richest deposit of aggregate there is considered unavailable, or “sterilized.” • It is estimated that 2 to 3 million tonnes of aggregate is required for each Upgrader Project in Alberta. • Once Edmonton’s Anthony Henday ring road is complete, over 4 million tonnes of gravel will have been used.