Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation
Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Research
Advancing Canadian Wastewater Assets
Advancing Canadian Wastewater Assets (ACWA) is an innovative partnership between the University of Calgary and The City of Calgary, as part of the Urban Alliance. Its goal is to advance wastewater treatment technologies to address environmental and human health issues. Learn more.
Centre for Environmental Engineering Research and Education
Some researchers in this centre are working to assess water pollution and control. They are looking at the treatment of emerging contaminants from municipal wastewaters, or industrial water treatment, including oil-sands process water, tailings ponds and boiler-feed water. Learn more.
Teaching, Learning and Student Experience
Community Water Safety
A small team of researchers from UCalgary is collaborating with council members and educators from the Sucker Creek First Nation to deliver a program to help solve a water quality problem in the community. Learn more.
WASH in Panama
A Master of Arts student completed collaborative community-engaged research on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in rural Panama. The student co-designed and conducted 15 educational WASH training sessions with 30 children and 20 adults to improve particular behavioural practices and increase environmental awareness. Learn more.
Testing Wastewater for Signs of COVID
UCalgary researchers from the Cumming School of Medicine, Faculty of Science, Schulich School of Engineering and Advancing Canadian Wastewater Assets teamed up with the City of Calgary and Alberta Health Services to test Calgary wastewater for early signs of COVID-19 cases.
Campus and Community Impact
Campus
UCalgary installs low water use devices in all new buildings and continues to retrofit existing washrooms with low water use devices. Rainwater and recycled water are also used for toilet flushing in multiple buildings. Recycled water from the Central Heating and Cooling plant is also used for irrigation throughout main campus. Finally, water bottle refill stations are provided on campus to ensure students, faculty and staff can keep their reusable water bottles full.
National
Faculty of Science is developing methodologies that can assess the chemical formation and composition of disinfected waters and overall water toxicity. The hope is to use this information to optimize engineering processes, develop new water treatments and provide policy-makers with the knowledge base to create guidelines for the safe use of wastewater.
International
Hydrologists in the Faculty of Science are studying the impact of changing snowpack on water supply to Alberta’s cities. The study is the first comprehensive hydrological study in the Canadian Rockies, which includes glacier, snow, stream and groundwater.