CDE Group wash plant open house set for Sept. 7

United Kingdom-based CDE Group, in partnership with concrete, asphalt and aggregate recycling firm Calgary Aggregate Recycling Inc. (CAR), will host an open house event to showcase the company’s largest construction and demolition (C&D) waste recycling plant in Canada.

Recently commissioned at CAR’s recycling facility in southeast Calgary, the new 250 tons per hour (tph) washing solution, designed and engineered by CDE, will take center stage on Sept. 7 as industry representatives gather to learn more about CDE’s recycling process and the impact its technology is having on resource availability in Calgary and Alberta.

To register for the event, visit cdegroup.com/calgary.

“We have been very busy hosting tours since opening and have received tremendous feedback from the community on how we can help them achieve their business and environmental goals,” says CAR President Travis Powell. “It is a pleasure to host this open house event with our partners at CDE to showcase this impressive facility that its team has delivered and to highlight the benefits of waste recycling.”

He says the aim of the plant is to disrupt what he calls “out-of-date practices” in the construction industry.

“We set out to establish economical and viable solutions to position Alberta as a leader in sustainable and responsible construction,” he says. “We started this process by applying for a grant with Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA). It believed in the impact our proposal could have and gave us the start we needed to get to where we are today. With the ERA’s backing and CDE’s incredible support, expertise and proven experience in this space, we are strongly positioned to make significant strides forward in our mission to reduce the cost of construction—socially, environmentally and economically.”

With help from CDE’s aggregate washing technology, the company now has the capacity to process an additional 600,000 tons of construction and demolition (C&D) waste material, generating more than 1.25 million tons of construction sand and aggregate products every year across the wider company operations.

Photo courtesy of CDE Group

“This plant is both the largest we have ever commissioned in Canada but also our first partnership with CAR which demonstrates real confidence in our washing technology and recycling process,” says Adrian Convery, CDE Group business development manager for Canada. “It’s a partnership that is pioneering better ways of managing resources in Canada, driving forward the agenda for change and building a strong case for the adoption of recycled materials in the construction industry by highlighting the immense potential of C&D waste streams.”

In addition to the significant volume of material the plant is diverting from landfills, the circular approach to resource management also is reducing carbon emissions in Alberta, which CDE Group says is critical because the Canadian population is on track to double by 2050.

“CDE waste recycling solutions are perfectly adapted to support urban centers where the need for construction materials is greatest,” Convery says. “As well as landfill diversion, our solutions help to realize sustainability aims by reducing or completely eliminating the requirement to truck in sand and aggregate resources from other jurisdictions—an approach that generally comes at a significant environmental cost.”

The plant should reduce carbon emissions in Alberta by an estimated 22,567 tons annually, says CDE Group, which has North American offices in Cleburne, Texas.

While reaching out to CAR, CDE Group says it facilitated meetings virtually and used 3D modeling and remote technologies to showcase to CAR its waste recycling plants at Brewster Bros, based in Scotland, a family business that recently announced it was investing in its second CDE wash plant, and the Long Island, New York-based Posillico Materials LLC, home to the first contaminated soils wash plant of its kind in the US, and in other locations.

Equipment at CAR

CAR commissioned its first wash plant with CDE Group, consisting of an R4500 primary feeding and scalping screen with the M4500 modular sand washing plant and an AggMaxTM 253R scrubbing and classification system, which combines pre-screening, scrubbing, organics removal, sizing, stockpiling, fines recovery and filtrates removal on a compact chassis.

The solution also features CDE’s EvoWashTM, a modular sand washing system that screens and separates smaller sand and gravel fractions through an integrated high-frequency dewatering screen and hydrocyclone technology to control silt cut points and eliminate the loss of fines, as well as its counter-flow classification unit technology which offers a variable separation to provide greater control over sand classification.

CAR’s system also includes CDE’s AquaCycleTM thickener water management system, which offers recycling of up to 90 percent of process water and its filter press sludge dewatering system which presses sludge discharged from the thickener to recover even more water – bringing recovery up to 95 percent.

Among the outputs are 0-1 mm fines and 0-4 mm coarse sands, as well as 4-10 mm undersize, 10-20 mm midsize, 20-40mm, 40-100 mm and less than 100 mm oversize aggregates.

Tested to ensure compliance with the city of Calgary standards and specifications, the products are marketed to the wider construction industry in Calgary and Alberta and are supporting a range of major public works and infrastructure projects.