Combined Soils Stabilisation Ltd have recently completed a small Earthworks and Lime Stabilisation / Improvement.

The site was wet and no suitable fill materials were available due to them being too wet to achieve the required shear strength to be placed as acceptable engineered fill. The soils also had cobbles and boulders present throughout.

The site was secluded and found at the top of a forestry track. CSSL’s work was to undertake the earthworks and lime modify the wet soils which has been stockpiled in a storage area. Due to cobbles and boulders in the stockpiled soils and the working space being constrained the normal Wirtgen Mixer was not suitable, therefore CSSL used the FAE rock crusher / stabiliser. The FAE mixer can handle boulders without risk of any damage and breaks the hard materials down to a size less than 100mm.

The earthworks involved placing the soils for treatment, lime modifying, then pushing with our Komatsu D51 dozer before the final stockpile was formed with an excavator. The stockpile was sealed so the soils could be taken as and when required by the main contractor.

Whilst undertaking the works the environment agency came to witness the works to see how else lime stabilisation can be used to prevent muck away on schemes. This process has an approx. 60% re-carbonisation of the CO2 used to produce the quicklime when mixed into the soils making lime modification and stabilisation the number one environmental choice for any site, by removing the need for muck away followed by import of suitable materials.