LETHBRIDGE, AB – Demolition of the old YMCA building on Stafford Drive was a huge success when it comes to waste reduction.

The 60 year old building was closed and torn down after the new Cor Van Raay “Y” opened up on the west side.

Property Manager in Facility Services, Dean Romeril, says a new report shows more than 98 per cent of the building material was diverted from the landfill.

That works out to 5.79 million kg of total weight of material that never made it to the dump.

He says “the Facilities department at the City has been at this since around 2006, so achieving an above 90 per cent waste diversion on all our demo projects is pretty much the standard now. Hitting 98 per cent on this project is exceptional and is a great example of how deconstructions can be seen in a positive light.”

Some of the salvaged materials included boilers for heating the pool, pumps for the pool and a wheelchair ramp lift that were repurposed by the Town of Coaldale as well as exterior and interior lighting fixtures, bathroom fixtures, lockers, and basketball nets and backboards.

Deconstruction work began in March 2020.

Once the interior manual salvaging was completed, work crews began to mechanically dismantle the infrastructure with heavy equipment.

Metal was separated, collected, stockpiled and then hauled off site to a metal recycler and aggregate materials such as concrete, cinder block, brick, gravel and asphalt were hauled to the contractor’s yard for further processing and crushing into aggregate products.

Scrap metal including iron, copper, brass, aluminum, wire and tin were sold to a scrap metal company for recycling.