Selly Oak

The 12.5ha site is home to a new Sainsbury’s, Birmingham Life Sciences Campus, student accommodation, bars and restaurants. The project instigated an exceptional environmental offering from our team due to the ground contamination from the on-site waste and historic heavy industry plant.

Reprofiling and remediating exceptional quantities of earth

Our scope of works entailed reprofiling and remediating vast quantities of earth; 800,000m3 was moved with 400,000m3 being remediated. A 600m intermediate pressure gas main, a 500m underground 11kVA cable, a pylon tower and 500m of 132kVA overhead cable and 250m of storm drainage were all rerouted including the overhead cable underground.

The project presented a number of environmental challenges, which were the reason for our state-of-the-art on-site laboratory and soil hospital. We trialled different types of screeners to divide the materials into three streams: spoil to be reused, hard product for crushing, and refuse that was converted into refuse derived fuel by Careys.

The lab took samples from each 25m2 to ensure that it was both compatible with the land and suitable for backfill. All unsuitable land was remediated in the soil hospital before being reused. This was invaluable to the project because not only was approximately 70,000m3 of the materials on-site a mix of commercial, industrial and residential waste, but a large area of Victorian tunnels rife with coal tar was discovered.

We remediated this coal tar by stabilising it with lime and cement before it was blended. To ensure that any water was not returned contaminated, the GAC unit installed on-site cleaned it before it was released into the sewage network. The project also presented us with the opportunity to demonstrate our integrated services offering.