Report R 179 Ground engineering spoil: good management practice

Publication Year

1997

Document Status

Current

Abstract

Construction operations produce large volumes of surplus excavated materials. Much of this material is soil and rock excavated for new roads, tunnels and foundations to structures. The lack of suitable (and close) landfill sites has significantly increased disposal costs on some projects in recent years. Disposal costs have further increased with the introduction of the weight-based landfill tax in October 1996. They are expected to continue to rise as a result of government policy to use the tax as a means of reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill. There is both increasing pressure and incentive, therefore, to minimise the amount of construction spoil sent to landfill sites, but to do so depends on being able to reduce, recycle and reuse more of it. That, in turn, calls for reliable information about how construction sites handle wastes, and spoil from ground engineering operations in particular. Reduction, reuse or recycling of spoil will only be a viable option if considered as such in the design, operation and management of the works taken as a whole and not as separate activities, i.e. planned in relation to the construction project, its locality and its timing, and in detail at operator level for individual tasks. For simplicity, the term 'spoil' as used in the rest of this report refers to soil, rock or other ground materials which are excavated (e.g. the material taken to form a cutting, or arisings from a trench or foundation excavation or tunnel, and which may be temporarily stockpiled). In some cases the spoil will be a mixture of ground materials with the products used in certain geotechnical processes (e.g. bentonite slurry, grout).

ISBN

9780860174844

Publisher Information