Advancing Canadian Water Assets (ACWA)

Advancing Canadian Water Assets’ (ACWA) goal is to help develop wastewater treatment technologies that will remove existing and emerging contaminants to improve ecosystem and human health. ACWA's infrastructure is embedded within the City of Calgary’s Pine Creek Wastewater Treatment facility and includes advanced wastewater treatment processes and 12 experimental streams that can be dosed with various constituents or municipal effluents. Together, we use these facilities to demonstrate advanced treatment techniques and the impact of the resultant effluent on the environment.

ACWA's onsite laboratory has state-of-the-art facilities to quantify contaminant residues, identify and culture cells, determine water-borne pathogens and examine gene expression in model organisms. Additional laboratories (microbiology, aquatic and stable isotope) on the University of Calgary campus complement and support ACWA's research program. The first facility of its kind, the ACWA research facility bridges the gap between bench and pilot-scale research laboratories, and applications in full-scale municipal wastewater treatment plants.

ACWA’s themes: Water reuse/ recycling , receiving environment and mesocosm studies, wastewater based monitoring, research in antimicrobial resistance to inform human and health policy, sensor development and demonstration.

The ACWA research facility enables research that cannot be done anywhere else in the world. Current lab-sized facilities cannot realistically replicate actual field situations. Municipal treatment plants around the world are not suited to intensive research programs – particularly if the experiments involve contaminants harmful to people and the environment. We expect that researchers and city planners from around the world will visit Calgary to learn from the system and test their own thinking as they develop solutions for their own unique challenges.