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FEBRUA RY 2018 | 53 Composting Facility – City of Calgary PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY CITY OF CALGARY Composting Facility – City of Calgary by ROBIN BRUNET D iverting waste from landfill is a goal for most North American cities, and John Berry, senior project deliv- ery engineer for the Waste & Recycling Services business unit at the City of Calgary, says, "We have a goal to divert 70 percent of our waste by 2025, and we began by collecting recyclables via our successful Blue Cart program in 2009. "However, we were still a long way from reaching 70 percent; so we turned our attention to organics, and that's how our new Composting Facility was born." It has been estimated that 65 per- cent of single family household waste in Calgary is made up of compostables – but up until the Chinook Resource Management Group (CRMG) consor- tium was formed to help finance, design, build, and operate the facility Berry speaks of, that waste went to landfill. The 356,000-square-foot Composting Facility is the largest of its kind in Canada. Not only was it designed and constructed to world- class odour control standards, it is a water negative facility, meaning haz- ardous run-off from the composting process called leachate is fully reused within the system for irrigation pur- poses – thus dramatically reducing the chance of a dangerous environmental release. Also, stormwater on the entire site is reclaimed and reused, saving 40 million litres of potable water yearly. Berry credits Stantec's architects and engineers for working out the design and engineering logistics of the facility on a 62-acre landfill site south- east of Calgary, and for ensuring the administration building met new LEED v4 standards. "This was the first pub- lic private partnership project the City had ever undertaken, and therefore the pressure was on to get everything right – which is why we were so fortunate to retain Stantec's services," says Berry. Todd Hartley, architect and prin- cipal in charge, Stantec, says the Composting Facility "aligns with our values at Stantec: to execute projects that have a large community impact and to bring our local and global exper- tise to all the design services." Indeed, using BIM as well as their expertise, Stantec's design teams modelled every component of the building, from duc- twork and structural supports, to process equipment. Stantec designed the facility to take up to 100,000 tonnes of organic waste from households and 45,000 wet tonnes of wastewater treatment plant biosolids annually. Both waste streams are treated separately by being ground down repeatedly (for the organic waste) and mixed with woodchips (for the biosolids). Both streams are then fed into large process vessels, where a natural break- down process occurs for 21 days and where temperature, moisture and oxy- gen levels are maintained by blowers (and whose water content is controlled by sprinklers). During this process, the pasteurization phase also occurs where temperature is maintained at over 55 Celsius for three days. The compost material is then screened for contami- nants as small as 10 millimetres. After the material spends a further 21 days in a 9,000-square-metre curing structure, it is transferred to a storage facility, ready to be used in everything from agricultural lands to residential gardens. "The benefit of all this is three- fold," says Berry. "First, our landfills fill less quickly. Second, we can sell the compost. Lastly, compost does not gen- erate any methane gas, which would otherwise normally happen in landfills." As the first commercial building registered under LEED v4, the admin- istration building was designed to use 51 percent less energy than a baseline building, thanks to scrupulous mechan- ical, electrical, and envelope design. Stantec's expertise in executing large P3 projects led to many efficien- cies during construction, which began in August of 2015. For example, driven steel piles combined with shallow type foundations through the interior regions of the main facility reduced the amount of soil that needed to be exca- vated and allowed two foundations crews to work independently. LOCATION 114th Avenue, Calgary, Alberta OWNER/DEVELOPER City of Calgary PROJECT MANAGER Chinook Resources Management Group (Maple Reinders and Bird Construction 50/50 Partnership) ARCHITECT Stantec Architecture Ltd. GENERAL CONTRACTOR (JV) Maple Reinders / Bird Construction Inc. STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ ELECTRICAL/LEED CONSULTANT Stantec Consulting Ltd. TOTAL SIZE 521,000 square feet TOTAL COST $143 million 3:55 PM

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