What Happens at ECCO?

Residents in southeast Calgary have experienced smoke, odour and understandable uncertainty as a result of the September fire. ECCO recognizes the disruption and concern this has caused, particularly for families, businesses and community facilities near the site. Residents deserve clear information about the fire, the work taking place at the property, air-quality monitoring and the site’s future. 

The ECCO property has supported several distinct operations over its history. Understanding the difference between the current fire response, landfill closure, materials recovery and future reclamation is important to understanding what is happening at the site today. 

Above all the multi-purpose current uses at ECCO, regional and site safety issues remain paramount.

Responding to the Current Fire (September 2026)

ECCO continues to work with the Calgary Fire Department, the City of Calgary and Alberta Environment to address the fire and stabilize the affected area.

Fires and localized hot spots can occur at landfill and waste-management sites across Calgary. Many are detected early and contained by trained site operators as part of normal emergency-response procedures; a major fire is different in its scale, duration, potential effects beyond the property and the level of support required from emergency services. The September fire at ECCO developed into a major incident, and ECCO recognizes that distinction and the concern it has caused.

Trained operators and heavy equipment are being used to expose and suppress areas of fire, move material safely within the site and place soil over affected areas. Trucks bringing soil to the property are supporting fire suppression, stabilization and landfill closure. They are not delivering new waste for disposal in the landfill.

ECCO recognizes the community’s concern about smoke and air quality. The company supports continued monitoring, the public release of verified information and a full review of the fire and the measures needed to reduce future risk.

The Landfill

ECCO’s landfill received dry, non-hazardous construction and demolition waste. This included material from the construction, renovation and demolition of buildings rather than household garbage or organic waste. Private landfills, like the one ECCO operated, help divert waste from publicly operated and funded landfills and helps extend their operating lifecycle.

The landfilling use at ECCO’s site commenced at a time when the immediate area was largely heavy industry, including a former explosives factory and a rock quarry – hence the name “Quarry Park”. In fact, much of the lands lying east of 24th Street SE (ECCO’s location) remain largely medium and heavy industrial uses.

The landfill is no longer receiving new waste for disposal. Work at the landfill now relates to fire response, stabilization, closure and reclamation.

Closing a landfill is an active and carefully managed process. It requires trained operators, heavy equipment, internal movement and grading of existing material, soil placement, slope stabilization, environmental monitoring and coordination with municipal and provincial regulators.

Trucks and equipment moving within the landfill are not evidence that new waste is being accepted. Existing material must be moved and graded to stabilize the site and establish its final contours. Soil must also be brought to the property to suppress the current fire, cover existing material and complete closure work.

Walking away from the property would not safely close the landfill. The existing material would remain in place without the equipment, operators, monitoring and coordinated work needed to stabilize and reclaim it.

The Materials-Recovery Facility

Separate from the landfill, ECCO operates a materials-recovery facility, commonly called an MRF. The facility sorts and processes construction and demolition material generated by residential construction, home renovations, commercial projects and demolitions across Calgary and the surrounding region. 

Materials such as wood, metal, concrete, cardboard and certain plastics are separated for recycling, reuse or further processing. What might be “waste” at a public landfill can often be repurposed into new commodities at a purpose built facility such as ECCO’s. Suitable material is also processed into low-carbon fuel at ECCO’s MRF and shipped to approved industrial users as an alternative to conventional fossil fuels, with the goal of reducing carbon emissions.

Low-carbon fuel (LCF) is one of several commodities produced through the MRF. ECCO has also produced and marketed wood chips and other recovered materials for many years. Wood-chip production is a long-standing and successful part of ECCO’s business, with established uses and markets that are separate from – and do not depend on – the contracted receiving arrangement for low-carbon fuel.

The low-carbon-fuel material recently visible in piles at the site was intended to be temporary inventory awaiting further processing and shipment and is not material intended for landfill disposal. An interruption within the outbound-shipping system caused material to accumulate faster than it could be moved to receiving facilities. Put another way, the company contracted to receive the low-carbon fuel has experienced repeated and prolonged periods when its facility has been offline, leaving thousands of tonnes of construction and demolition material awaiting processing and thousands of tonnes of LCF material awaiting shipment at the ECCO site. 

Material continued to arrive from Calgary construction, renovation and demolition projects while less processed material could move out of the facility. This imbalance contributed to the accumulation of on-site material. 

ECCO recognizes that the resulting volume and location of the piles created concern and is working to process and ship the accumulated LCF, restore normal material flow and improve contingency planning so that a similar interruption does not result in prolonged on-site storage.

ECCO is working to restore the normal flow of incoming, processed and outgoing materials and to establish more resilient arrangements for future interruptions.

The MRF does not burn waste or low-carbon fuel at the ECCO property. It sorts and processes material before recyclable products and fuel are transported to other approved facilities.

These activities are different from placing waste into a landfill. Materials recovery is intended to keep usable material in circulation and reduce the amount ultimately requiring disposal. This further contributes to extending the lifecycle of publicly funded landfills and helps build a circular economy.

What ECCO Proposed in 2023

In September 2023, ECCO submitted applications to the City of Calgary proposing a significant change to the property’s operations and long-term future.

The proposal was intended to transition the site away from receiving waste for landfill disposal and develop a community mixed-use hub right beside Calgary’s green line transit. ECCO proposed progressively excavating the existing landfill, recovering recyclable material, processing suitable material into low-carbon fuel and shipping residual material that could not be recovered to another approved disposal facility. 

The proposal was a reclamation plan to fully remove all landfill materials from the site, then re-purpose the land for commercial and residential uses. Southeast Calgary already contains successful examples of former industrial lands being reclaimed and put to new uses. Deerfoot Meadows occupies the site of a former wartime chemical plant that produced materials used in explosives and, later, fertilizer, while Quarry Park was developed on a former sand-and-gravel extraction site. 

Calgary has a demonstrated history of transforming former industrial and extraction lands into productive new parts of the city. Former industrial lands have also transformed into mixed-use districts in East Village and Eau Claire. These examples demonstrate that a site’s historic industrial use does not prevent an appropriately regulated transition to future employment, commercial, residential, recreational or community uses.

Under the proposal, the materials-recovery facility would have been upgraded to process both material recovered from the existing landfill and material received from construction, demolition, renovation and other recycling operations.

As reclamation progressed, the landfill mound would have been reduced and ultimately removed. The long-term objective was to prepare the property for future redevelopment associated with the planned Quarry Park Green Line station and the surrounding community.

The necessary municipal approvals were not granted, and the reclamation program could not proceed as originally proposed. Since that time, ECCO and the City have been involved in development-permit, enforcement, appeal and court processes concerning different activities at the property.

Those proceedings have contributed to public uncertainty about the site. They have also made it increasingly important to distinguish among landfill disposal, landfill closure, materials recovery and the reclamation proposal. They are not the same activities, and each is subject to its own regulatory requirements.

ECCO’s Contribution to Calgary

ECCO was founded in Calgary in 1992 and began operating at the site in the 1990s. For more than three decades, the company has formed part of the waste-management and recycling system serving Calgary and the surrounding region.

Before material reaches ECCO, it comes from activities occurring throughout the city: new-home construction, renovations, commercial development, demolition projects and recycling operations. ECCO’s role has been to receive that material, separate recoverable products and reduce the amount requiring final disposal.

The 2023 application materials reported that ECCO had processed approximately 200,000 tonnes of material annually and approximately 4.5 million tonnes over the life of the operation. 

ECCO has also provided local employment, services to builders and contractors, access to recycling services for residents and businesses, and support for community organizations and initiatives.

ECCO’s materials-recovery work supports objectives the City of Calgary has established for reducing waste and recovering usable resources. Calgary’s Municipal Development Plan identifies waste reduction and improved resource recovery as a city-wide objective and states that Calgary aims to move toward zero waste through reduction, reuse, recycling and composting. The Plan specifically recognizes that construction and demolition activities generate a significant portion of the material disposed in landfills, even though materials such as untreated wood, concrete, asphalt, drywall, metal and cardboard can be recovered or recycled. 

It describes construction and demolition waste diversion as a collaborative effort between the City and the private sector and directs that recyclable material from these activities be responsibly diverted. By sorting mixed construction and demolition loads and recovering usable material before the remainder is disposed of, ECCO provides the type of private-sector processing capacity required to put these policies into practice.

Recovering and reusing material also aligns with the City’s Waste Diversion Strategy and the Calgary Climate Strategy – Pathways to 2050. The Climate Strategy commits Calgary to progress toward net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 and identifies collaboration with Calgary’s building and development industries as part of that work. 

Recycling wood, metal, concrete, cardboard and other construction materials keeps those resources in use, reduces demand for landfill capacity and supports a more circular economy. Processing suitable residual material into low-carbon fuel provides an additional recovery option for material that cannot readily be recycled into another product. 

These activities do not eliminate the need for safe operations and effective oversight, but they serve waste-diversion, resource-recovery and emissions-reduction objectives already adopted by the City.

What Calgary Could Lose Without ECCO

If ECCO’s materials-recovery operation is permanently lost, the construction and demolition material it handles will not disappear. It will have to be transported to other recycling facilities or disposed of at public or private landfills.

The immediate effects may be felt first by builders, renovators, demolition contractors and waste haulers through longer trips, fewer disposal choices and potentially higher transportation and processing costs. Over time, those costs can be passed through to homeowners, businesses and purchasers in the cost of construction, renovation and demolition work.

There may also be longer-term consequences for regular taxpayers. When recyclable construction material is placed in a City landfill, it uses limited public landfill capacity that must eventually be replaced or expanded. Landfill cells, roads, environmental controls, monitoring systems and future closure obligations are costly public infrastructure. Private-sector facilities that recover usable material can help extend the working life of public landfills and defer some of those future costs. The effect may not appear on an individual tax bill immediately, but the loss of local diversion capacity can contribute over time to greater pressure on municipal waste infrastructure, operating budgets and user fees.

Depending on available capacity and the location of alternative facilities, the broader effects could include:

• More construction and demolition material being disposed of rather than recovered.
• Greater demand on Calgary’s public landfills and other regional waste facilities.
• Faster consumption of existing landfill capacity.
• Longer hauling distances and additional truck traffic.
• Higher transportation and disposal costs for Calgary businesses and their customers.
• Additional fuel use and associated greenhouse-gas emissions.
• Loss of local employment, recycling expertise and private-sector infrastructure.
• Reduced capacity to convert suitable residual material into low-carbon fuel.
• A more difficult and potentially more expensive process for stabilizing, closing and reclaiming the existing landfill.

Environmental solutions often provide benefits gradually rather than producing an immediate, visible result. Extending landfill life, keeping recyclable materials in circulation and developing lower-carbon alternatives can take years to influence municipal costs or emissions. That does not make those benefits less important. Calgarians who want meaningful environmental progress should expect practical systems to exist for sorting, processing and finding new uses for material that would otherwise be buried.

The scale of these effects should be assessed using current operating volumes, customer information, alternative-facility capacity, hauling distances and the amount of material ECCO actually diverts. ECCO believes these consequences should be properly understood before Calgary permanently loses an established materials-recovery operation.

A Safe and Accountable Path Forward

Community safety and the site’s long-term future must remain central to the decisions ahead.

ECCO supports transparent environmental monitoring, clear operating requirements and an accountable closure and reclamation process. The company is committed to working with the Calgary Fire Department, the City of Calgary and Alberta Environment to address the current fire and safely manage the landfill.

ECCO also remains committed to the responsible production of low-carbon fuel. The company intends to work with its LCF customers and industry partners, the Province of Alberta and the City of Calgary to develop safe, properly regulated solutions that advance shared waste-diversion, circular-economy and emissions-reduction goals. This work must include reliable processing and shipping arrangements, appropriate limits on temporary storage, effective fire-prevention measures and clear regulatory oversight.

The property also presents a longer-term opportunity for Calgary. Once the landfill has been safely reclaimed and the necessary environmental and planning requirements have been satisfied, the site could support a community-oriented, transit-supportive development beside the future Quarry Park Green Line station. 

New housing, employment, shops, services and public spaces could support Green Line ridership, strengthen surrounding communities, expand Calgary’s tax base and demonstrate how a former industrial property can be reclaimed and returned to productive use. Although any redevelopment would require future study, approvals and community engagement, the opportunity could provide benefits extending well beyond the ECCO property.

Protecting neighbouring communities, completing the work required at the landfill, preserving useful recycling capacity and planning responsibly for the property’s future are not competing objectives. With clear approvals, effective oversight and transparent reporting, they can be advanced together.