Asbestos removal and restoration across Calgary

What Calgary’s housing means for asbestos

The 2021 Census counted about 502,300 occupied homes in Calgary. Roughly 59,800 were built in 1960 or earlier, 133,000 between 1961 and 1980, and 45,900 in the 1980s — close to 238,700 homes, or 47 per cent of the city, built before 1991. Those are the decades when asbestos was routine in floor tile and mastic, textured ceilings, drywall joint compound, duct wrap, pipe and boiler insulation, asbestos-cement siding and vermiculite attic insulation.

Just found it and not sure what to do? Read what to do if you have vermiculite in your attic — what to do first, whether it even contains asbestos, and what removal costs.

The older housing is concentrated by community, and the City’s own community profiles show where. In Fairview and Thorncliffe, about 91 per cent of homes were built before 1981. Southwood is at 87 per cent, Ogden 85, Acadia 83, Forest Lawn 80, Bowness 75, Dover 71, Haysboro 70 and Highland Park 67. Communities that read as old but have seen heavy infill since 2000 — Killarney, Altadore — are now less than half pre-1981. The rule of thumb for a Calgary homeowner is simple: if the house is from before 1990 and you are about to open a wall, a floor or a ceiling, test first.

If the sample comes back positive, the job runs the way every job of ours runs: poly on every opening, negative air, wet removal, manifested disposal and an independent clearance test. The asbestos removal in Calgary page shows all six steps in thirty seconds, on one of our own jobs.

If you searched for an abatement company in Calgary, or asbestos remediation in Calgary, this is the page. We work every quadrant of the city — from Beddington Heights and Huntington Hills in the north to Deer Ridge and the deep south, and everything between — and we answer 24/7 for emergency asbestos removal when material has already been disturbed.

The Calgary permit rule

The City of Calgary requires an Asbestos Abatement Information form before it will release a building or demolition permit on a house built before 1990. The form is a signed declaration that either all materials with the potential to release asbestos fibres have been removed from the project area, or that there are none; the City’s demolition guide adds that a copy of the asbestos assessment and the clearance letter must be available at inspection, and that Alberta OHS must have been notified at least 72 hours before the removal. In practice that means a demolition or a major renovation on an older Calgary house has three documents behind it — the assessment, the OHS notification and the third-party clearance — and we produce all three. We tell general contractors at the quoting stage who is filing the form, because a permit that stalls on it costs everyone a week.

Shepard, and what disposal actually involves

Asbestos from anywhere in the Calgary area can be disposed of at one place: the City’s Shepard Landfill. Disposal requires a City industrial waste permit, which has no fee and is valid for up to a year, and an appointment requested by 10 a.m. the business day before, for a slot between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on weekdays. The material must be wetted before bagging, double-bagged in 6-mil polyethylene, and sealed; bladders are limited to 20 cubic yards and bins to 40. The City’s commercial rate is $220 per tonne from February 2026. We carry the permit, book the slot, package the waste to that standard and hand you the weight ticket and manifest with the closeout file.

Water, hail and the years Calgary remembers

In June 2013 the Bow peaked at 2,400 cubic metres per second and the Elbow at 1,240; about 80,000 people were evacuated from 26 communities including Bowness, Sunnyside, Hillhurst, Inglewood, Mission, Elbow Park, Erlton, Roxboro and Rideau, and the City put its own infrastructure damage at $409 million. Many of those are the same pre-1980 communities listed above, which is why so much of the post-flood work was asbestos abatement before it was anything else. On 5 August 2024 a hailstorm hit almost one in five Calgary homes, generated more than 130,000 insurance claims and became the second-costliest insured event in Canadian history at an estimated $2.8 to $3.25 billion. Two months earlier the Bearspaw feeder main had failed under 16 Avenue in Montgomery and Bowness, putting the whole city on Stage 4 water restrictions for weeks.

Between the big years, the ordinary ones do the same damage more slowly: chinook melt into a February basement, ice dams on a 1960s roof, a hot-water tank that lets go. For water and fire damage we respond 24/7 anywhere in the city, and in an older house the wet material is tested before it is torn out, not swept up and sanded afterward.

Related reading

• City of Calgary asbestos abatement form
• What asbestos removal costs in Calgary
• Popcorn ceilings and asbestos: what to know
• Ice damming in Calgary's older roofs