Calgary Composting Facility
The Calgary Composting Facility is the largest facility of its kind in Canada, and the first LEED® v4 Gold registered commercial building in Alberta. The immense plant processes more than 145,000 metric tonnes of source-separated organics and dewatered biosolids every year, and covers 150,000 square metres.
The main composting building has a 31,000-square-metre footprint (an area equivalent to eight football fields) and includes a tipping floor where organic intake is performed, a shredding area, sealed in-vessel concrete composting tunnels with underfloor aeration and sprinklers, a curing building, and a storage building. Acid baths and large biofilters treat all outflowing air to eliminate odours. There is also an outdoor learning garden and classroom overlooking the composting facility that is used as part of a public education initiative. All rainwater on the site is harvested for use in the facility.
The facility was a Public-Private Partnership project awarded by the Calgary City Council to the Chinook Resource Management General Partnership, which was a consortium led jointly by Bird Construction. It was the first composting facility to be constructed using the P3 model in Canada. The contract was to design, build, finance, and operate the facility, and the consortium brought together the best sector expertise and resources required to successfully execute the project. The facility received the Silver National Award for Innovation and Excellence in Public-Private Partnerships from the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships and an Award of Excellence from the Canadian Consulting Engineers.
[[Auto Insert Gallery here]]
Back to projects