Soil Remediation at The Northern Quarter
The Process
The remediation is the process of dealing with contamination of the land due to its historical activities of gas works which could have affected human health and groundwater if not dealt with correctly.
To address the risk to future site users and the risk of further polluting the ground water, a number of strategies were adopted at The Northern Quarter:
1. Constructing a passive groundwater barrier around the site to filter out the contaminants.
2. Treating contaminated soils to enable the soils to be kept on site.
3. Installation of gas membranes and ventilation into the building fabric to prevent any toxic gases entering the building.
The Benefits
The major benefits of these strategies were:
1. Carbon Reduction
During the groundworks phase of the project, we have not has to bring in any new material to the site. This material would have been quarried and imported.
We have also had minimal waste taken away from site due to remediation and piling strategies adopted. This ultimately means a huge carbon reduction due to less trucks, lower diesel usage and therefore less greenhouse gases produced such as Carbon Dioxide.
2. Reducing Waste
Due to design changes by ROK, the volume of materials off-site was extremely low at only 350 cubic meters. This low volume resulted in less material to land fill at La Colette or even off the island.
Also, due to the piling technique which was chosen to be used on site, minimal waste has been removed from the ground, again, resulting in less trucks and less waste material sent to landfill.
100% of all the contaminated soils were dealt with and reused back on site.
