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.