At Wesgroup, we constantly seek creative ways to recycle waste materials and reduce our environmental impact. At PacificLink, an 83-acre “urban industrial” business community located in Surrey, BC, we will be able to use crushed concrete from demolished buildings at a New Westminster property to build a road base. We also were able to tap into a more natural resource.
Originally occupied by a variety of industrial businesses, including a large auto-wrecking company, Pacific Link has undergone extensive soil remediation since Wesgroup purchased it in 2004. Phase two of the development process – preparing the road and building for construction – is underway.
At this stage, we “pre-loaded” the property with more than 1.1 million tonnes of sand. This accomplished two objectives: compressing and stabilizing the underlying ground, while raising the site elevation. Typically, the sand would be purchased from an aggregate supplier and trucked to the property. At Pacific Link, located less than 1 km from the Fraser River, we thought we could do better.
We knew the river nearby was dredged regularly to keep shipping channels clear, and to reduce flood risks. We also knew the resulting silt and sand was normally barged out to sea. Was there a way to access this potentially valuable resource?
Wesgroup would purchase the dredged river sand and have it pumped directly onto Pacific Link’s 83 acres.
The end result? Nearly 700,000 m3 of sand was dredged from the river, and nearly 100,000 truckloads were kept off BC’s roads. This simple strategy removed 112 tonnes of CO2 from our environment, and further enhanced the shipping capacity of the Fraser River. We continue to investigate ways to reuse the preload materials, to keep the cycle going.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. (Rethink.)
