Waste management services such as muck away and non-hazardous muck away require careful planning. However, the most challenging site clearance projects are those that involve the removal of hazardous muck away. Rigorous environmental regulations and strict health and safety requirements need to be followed. Add in time constraints and you have an interesting and challenging project! This is what Soils and Stone faced when we were instructed to remove hazardous muck away from a busy railway line.
With any rail project, downtime significantly impacts commuters, so closing the railway line to carry out only this muck away programme not an option. Instead, Soils and Stone were required to complete the project at a time when the line was closed for other remedial works. Lorry movements would therefore need to be very carefully managed to prevent any impact on other aspects of the railway update programme or to the health and safety of the workers working on it. All without compromising the legislative and environmental requirements for the safe removal of hazardous muck away!
Over a period of three days, over 2,000 tonnes of hazardous muck away was removed and safely disposed of at landfill registered to take this type of waste. Working to designated times, lorry movements were planned, managed and tracked. In addition, both grab lorries and tipper lorries were used at different times to maximise the time on site.
Ozzy Cecil, MD at Soils and Stone continues ‘Rigorous planning over the duration of this ten-day period helped to maximise site efficiency for our transport and helped avoid any potential delays and penalties. Ultimately our aim was to build a workable timetable to minimise our clients costs and get the line back on track!’
Posted on: 10 June 2019
