Pile driving is underway for construction of Canada's largest-ever nutrient-recovery facility, which will remove phosphorus from sewage solids in Edmonton, Alberta, and use it to make 10,000 kilograms per day of plant fertilizer. The facility will scale up by 20 times a demonstration plant installed in 2007.
"We are constructing a standard reinforced-concrete slab foundation on top of driven steel piles," says Gavin Post, project manager at Epcor Water Services, Edmonton. The firm and Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Vancouver, B.C., are partnering with contractor PCL Construction to install the Ostara nutrient-recovery reactor. The project, set to finish in October, will address provincial concerns related to stricter limits on potentially polluting nutrients to protect sensitive watersheds. Manitoba has set a new effluent-discharge limit for phosphorus, to take effect in 2016, and Alberta is considering new rules. The 600-sq-meter, 12-m-high facility will be built at the Clover Bar sewage-settling lagoons at Edmonton's Waste Management Center, where biosolids from the city's 310- million-liter-per-day Gold Bar wastewater treatment plant are discharged.