Awards

2005 - Winner
Building Awards Specialist Contractor
Innovation of the Year

Coleman’s second category win of the evening was gained by a simple idea: washing the spoil dug up by its excavation business and recycling it. The idea, which was intended to take advantage of grant aid from the government’s Waste Resource Action Programme, was to take pre-screened material and wash it to remove material not suitable for construction.

Coleman researched the idea for 18 months. It travelled across Europe to search for suitable plant, picked the brains of key suppliers and eventually came up with a process for grading spoil into differently sized materials from clay to 40 mm aggregate. A complex combination of power screens, log washers and air knives subdivides the material ready for recycling in future projects.

The process was tested at Coleman & Company’s park central project in Birmingham, where 200.000 m³ of contaminated material was dealt with, and 98% of it was recycled.