A slip hazard, cleared and concreted over.
A Wolverhampton yard where rotted cardboard had broken down into the ground, turning the working surface into a slip risk for pedestrians and forklifts. We cleared it, found the damage underneath, and put the floor back properly.
Not a waste job. A safety job.
Cardboard had been stored and handled in the yard for long enough that it had rotted down and worked itself into the ground. The result was a layer of wet, broken-down material spread across the working surface – and a genuine HSE problem. It was slippery underfoot, and worse under a forklift. On a site with vehicle and pedestrian movement, that's not a housekeeping issue to get round to. It's the kind of thing that stops the job or hurts somebody.
Cardboard, soil and standing water
The material wasn't clean cardboard and it wasn't clean soil – it was both, rotted together, mixed with general yard waste and holding water. That combination is awkward: too contaminated to go as clean recycling, too bulky and wet to shift with a shovel and a skip.
It also covered a large area of the working yard, so it couldn't be dealt with in a corner while everything carried on around it.
Scrape, grab, clear, repair
Four stages, all handled through one point of contact.
Scrape
Machines brought in to scrape the contaminated layer off the floor and windrow it into workable piles.
Grab away
Grab lorries loaded straight from the piles and took the material off site for licensed disposal.
Clean down
The yard was cleaned down to the slab – which is when the damage underneath became visible.
Repair
Damaged concrete cut out and re-poured, with the broken-out material taken for recycling.
Clearing it revealed the real problem
Once the yard was down to the slab, the concrete underneath turned out to be damaged. Left alone, it would have held water and broken up further – and the same problem would have come back.
Clearing the waste was only ever going to be half a fix. If the floor stays broken, it fills again. So we sorted the floor.
Cut out, re-poured, back in service
We brought in one of our trusted groundworks suppliers to cut out the damaged sections of slab and re-pour them in industrial-grade C40 concrete with fibre reinforcement – a spec built for forklift traffic and heavy yard use, not a patch.
The concrete that came out didn't go to landfill. It went for crushing and recycling, the same as the hardcore off any of our demolition jobs.
The customer got a clean, safe, working yard and a floor that will take the traffic – arranged through one contact rather than a waste firm, a groundworks firm and a haulier all blaming each other.
Before and after
Yard or site needs clearing? Clearance, disposal and groundworks from one team.
See site clearance →Got a problem like this?
Tell us what's on the ground and where. We'll clear it, deal with what's underneath, and dispose of it legally.