If there's a green way of doing something the Town of Okotoks is on it.

With a new Operations Centre, storm water and run off needs to be handled in the area and instead of pumping the water back into the river the Town in partnership with Source 2 Source Environmental Design and Engineering, the University of Calgary and the Bow River Basin Council have set up a research project with a more sustainable framework.

The Living Soil Filtration Project is a combination of the natural way of rain water percolating through the soil on its own and using a pipe to send it straight to the river; a system called "Riparian Bio-Retention."

The Town's Interim Environment and Sustainability Coordinator Stefan Martensson says the project uses trees and soil to treat and manage storm water.

"It's an innovative storm water filtration system that filtrates the water before it hits the Sheep River. So if you go down there, they've planted hundreds of different plants, trees and shrubs and these plants are planted for a very specific reason, to extract some of the pollutants that may be in the storm water."

Martensson says the U of C and BRBC are monitoring the research project at the new Operation Centre.

"Initally they wanted to do a 5 year research project on site so we allocated a little space for them and they wanted to do four research beds and in these beds they were trying to decipher what plants species would help the bio-retention best basically."

The small study has since grown into a million dollar project funded by a number of groups.

"The town has contributed quite a bit both in labour and financially but also the province has different grants they have contributed to the program, the federal  government has a few programs also contributing to this. So it has grown from a small kind of innocent project to the largest research project in western Canada."

The bio-retention system has attracted the attention of many municipalities across the country as it is capable of preventing excess nutrients and other potentially harmful substances from entering the waters of the Sheep River that could lead to negative environmental impacts downstream.

A grand opening for the Environmental Educational Centre, located within the Operations Centre to interpret their research, and the research site is planned for the Spring of 2017.

To learn more about the project visit okotoks.ca