Project Outline
Our operation at Cowley Hill Works is the largest of a number of projects Hidden Assets are currently undertaking for the multinational glassmaker NSG Pilkington. Having won tender for the project in 2016, the 100 acre site is to be cleared to make way for a landmark development of 800 new homes. It is currently amongst the largest demolition projects in the UK.
Services Provided
Cowley Hill Works included, amongst other aspects, a major glassmaking furnace, laminating and cutting lines and facilities for stacking and storing glass.
Production at Cowley Hill was housed across multiple large-scale warehouses with offices and amenities in number of smaller brick-built structures. Whilst most were scheduled for demolition, we are also working with NSG to relocate one of their steel-portal buildings to a new location.
Cowley Hill Works was a truly historic site, with a heritage of glass production that extends back over a century. As such, it had accumulated a variety of hazardous waste including asbestos which we removed safely and effectively.
Due to the scale of the site, one aspect of our work at Cowley Hill is the removal and processing of over a million tonnes of concrete slab.
Ground manufacture produces a number of waste materials that can contaminate its location. With a residential use planned in the future, an important aspect of the job is to test and remediate land for its planned purpose. Under this service bracket, our work here has also involved de-foresting areas of site, draining lakes and disposing of fish in line with Government guidelines. In addition, our scope of ground works includes the grading of deep voids where an underground conveyor line had been.
Project Outline
In our second project for the pharmaceutical company BTG, we were tasked with the decommissioning of a their research and manufacturing operation in Alzenau, Germany — the functions of which were being relocated to the UK.
Based on the successful completion of an earlier project for the client, we were invited to tender (and won the contract) in 2017. The contract required the sensitive extraction of the client’s plant and facilities from a building which, housing other companies beside BTG, remained in use throughout our works.
The main aspect of this job was the decommissioning of a large, multi-chamber cleanroom on the ground floor of the facility alongside ancillary plant housed above it on the first floor. In addition to this we safely packaged and transfer a significant quantity of equipment to the UK for the client, even storing some of it temporarily on their behalf at our own UK warehouse.
By working alongside the site’s landlord from the outset, we were able to massively reduce the back-end cost of BTGs ‘full repairs’ lease by developing a scope of works with all parties which prepared the premises for its next use.
Project Outline
With an annual revenue of £45 billion, INEOS ranks amongst the largest petrochemical corporations in the world. In 2015, the company was preparing to move out of a PVC manufacturing facility in Swindon. Due to the nature and use of the site, the project was especially complex with specialised equipment needing to be moved securely to a new location in Durham.
Having been invited to tender, Hidden Assets proposed a time and cost-effective solution for the safe removal of equipment, systems and chemical waste — and won the contract by a wide margin. We subsequently completed works well within our deadline leaving the site empty and swept-clean in time for INEOS’s handover of the premises back to its landlord.
Early on, we sought to negotiate with the site’s landlord to understand their requirements of the site once INEOS vacated. Our schedule of works was then designed not only to extract INEOS’s operation from site, but also fulfil the repairs aspect of their lease.
A significant quantity of the equipment at the Swindon Site required moving to a new facility. As such, we decommissioned, dismantled, packaged and transported a range of large and high-value assets to the client’s new location.
As the site was scheduled for reuse rather than demolition, we conducted a soft strip of all the remaining plant and equipment whilst maintaining essential services to the building.
We removed areas of concrete slab and foundation to allow remediation to take place underneath as contamination is localised.
We carried out schedule of remediation works which included: Digging out contaminated substructures, testing and disposing of contaminated materials, retesting to establish acceptable levels and backfilling to make-good concrete floors.