CASE STUDIES

A Role for Compost in the Regeneration of the Former Royal Ordnance Factory BAE Systems, Chorley

BAE Systems Ltd has driven a £400million programme of development which will transform the closed Royal Ordinance Factory at Chorley to create the village of Buckshaw, with its own business park and surrounding natural areas of woodland and grasslands plus extensive areas of informal public recreation.
 
Because the brownfield site (265 hectares) was contaminated with residual explosives, topsoil was stripped from the entire site and buried in an on-site landfill. There was insufficient topsoil available locally to import for all landscape soft end-uses.
 
A practical and economically viable solution was to import BSI PAS 100 composted green material and mix this with subsoils which were geotechnically unsuitable to build on but which were excellent soil-forming materials.
 
ERC provided technical expertise in the development of the topsoil, designing mixes based on preliminary trials undertaken at Ness Botanic Gardens (University of Liverpool). The whole process from trials to application of manufactured topsoil is described in the PowerPoint PDF.


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