Cranes Fluid Systems, Ipswich

Site Overview

The Envirotreat Technology was applied to remediate contaminated liquid waste settlement lagoon at an industrial factory in Ipswich, Suffolk.

The Crane Fluid Systems factory had seen industrial activity for 70 years. The contamination was the result of liquid wastes from the manufacturing process. As a result, considerable material was identified as being substantially contaminated with heavy metals and hydrocarbons, including TPH, toluene, TCE and TCA.

Objective

The remediation strategy for the Ipswich site was designed to address the contaminated lagoon area. This represented an area at the northern extremity of the site, whereby liquid wastes from various manufacturing processes had been discharged into a settlement pond over a period of many years.

Following cessation of disposal activities, Cranes decided to restore the settlement pond and surrounding environ for use as an car parking and general landscape areas.

Methodology

Numerous remediation strategies were considered for the site and only Envirotreat stabilisation / solidification with E-clay was found to meet all the requirements of the Quantitative Risk Assessment and provide a sustainable solution and most importantly a material with suitable geotechnical properties to enable reuse on-site.

The modified organophillic clay was designed on a site specific basis prior to the commencement of the remedial works. Bench and site trials were undertaken to prove the suitability of the E-clay process and formed an important part of the validation process, both for WRc Ltd. and the Environment Agency.

Envirotreat employed an ex-situ soil mixing strategy to remediate approximately 2,800m³ of contaminated soils at the lagoon site.

The works were conducted over a period of 3 months under the auspices of Envirotreat’s Mobile Process Licence (MPL). Specialist technology, materials and supervision were supplied by Envirotreat, Chris Griffin Groundworks supplied all the required plant, and labour for application of the Envirotreat process.

The lagoon material was excavated by dragline and stored in prior to treatment. Due to the nature of the contaminated material, Envirotreat utilised its specialist plant to combine the contaminated material and E-clay slurry.

Delivering land you can develop

Envirotreat are a specialist remediation solution provider and sole providers of E-Clay technology