Durham Oshawa Waste Management Facility located at 1640 Ritson Road North is the busiest waste site in the Durham Region. The facility, built in the 1960’s and originally designed to accommodate a few hundred cars a day currently processes up to 2,000 customers a day. The population of the Region is projected to double by 2041, and Durham identified a need to revitalize and optimize the facility to improve the user experience, accommodate future growth, and to support significant changes in waste management and continued diversion efforts.
Strasman Architects was engaged by Durham Region to develop a Master Plan, as well as full Design and Implementation services, for the facility that identified the operations requirements to support the increased capacity requirements of the community, optimize operational workflow, materials collection capacity and implementation logistics and flexibility to incorporate future collection and diversion programs.
As design lead, Strasman led an engagement process with the Region’s project leaders and stakeholders, toured precedent facilities, and developed a site circulation flow for the facility that accommodates increased materials processing capacity, clear, safe, and intuitive separation of public and service vehicles, and fosters the Region’s mandate for waste diversion and collection of non-chargeable items such as electronics, tires, paint and hazardous household waste, as well as a re-use center to expand the current third-party collection of re-use items such as household goods and clothing.
