Sister companies Bachy Soletanche and Vibro Menard recently completed a geotechnical works package for North London Waste Authority’s Eco Park South project in Edmonton, London.
Eco Park South is the first phase in North London Waste Authority’s plan to build a £1.2bn sustainable waste management hub at Edmonton Eco Park.
Taylor Woodrow awarded piling contractor Bachy Soletanche and ground improvement specialist Vibro Menard the contract for geotechnical design and construction works for the park’s two new waste management facilities: a resource recovery facility (RRF) and reuse and recycling centre (RRC).
The ground engineering team also carried out the piling works for an integrated odour control and ventilation system building.
During a 10 month period, a range of methods, including continuous flight auger (CFA) piling, controlled modulus columns (CMCs), Trenchmix and slurry walling, were adopted to deliver the technically challenging scope of works.
Bachy Soletanche installed a total of 448 CFA piles, which were bored to depths of 25m and ranged in diameter from 400mm to 600mm.
The team also constructed a low permeability cut off wall for the RRF, which is 400m long, 0.4m wide and 6m deep. The wall was mostly formed using the Trenchmix method – an insitu soil mixing technique that was selected for its ability to mitigate hydrostatic uplift of the ground floor slab.
A section of the wall was constructed using a long-reach excavator under slurry, which achieved complete soil replacement. It was chosen due to the site's high groundwater levels.
According to Bachy Soletanche, the use of Trenchmix provided an environmentally friendly cut off wall solution, which led to approximately a 30% reduction in embodied carbon, when compared to a traditional sheet pile wall.
Vibro Menard was contracted to install the 1,130 CMCs to support the RRF building’s ground slab. The use of CMCs offered a robust solution for the weak ground conditions and the building’s high load bearing pressures. It also avoided the risks associated with drilling down past an existing sewer.
Compared to the traditional CFA method, CMCs require no steel reinforcement cages and allow for a thinner ground slab. CMCs also avoid soil extraction and disposal by laterally displacing the soil back into the ground.
Bachy Soletanche and Vibro Menard said that the combined techniques helped contribute to an overall reduction of approximately 10-16% in the total embodied carbon in the geotechnical works.
Earlier this year, Taylor Woodrow oversaw the first UK pour of Exegy ultra-low carbon concrete to form the base slabs for a temporary bulky waste facility at Edmonton Eco Park.
In 2021, to make way for the RRF and RRC facilities, Barhale carried out complex engineering work to divert two Thames Water sewers which converged beneath the centre of the RRF’s footprint.
The wider North London Heat and Power Project will include an energy recovery facility to generate low carbon energy from waste.
It is expected that by 2051 the new hub will manage up to 700,000t of waste a year.
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Tagged with: Bachy Soletanche ground improvement North London Waste Authority Piling Taylor Woodrow vibro menard
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