A spoiled journey?
A story spanning from Newcastle-under-Lyme to Northumberlandia
It’s not often that piles of homeless rock and soil make a difference to your career, especially when you’ve moved companies in the interim. There is also a lesson in how even the most innocuous comment can make such a difference.
Environmental Operations Advisor Darren Watson shares his experiences of finding a home for spoil, an often overlooked resource.
The innocuous comment in my case started with “my father-in-law manages a quarry”. Quite a dull fact, though as a lapsed geologist, I’ve always been quite proud to still be associated with the profession. At the time I dropped that into conversation, I was stood with the Environment Agency and Staffordshire Wildlife Trust looking at a re-naturalised stretch of Lyme Brook in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
While working for Severn Trent Water on the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA); an initiative designed to bring stakeholders together for the betterment of rivers and their ecosystems; I’d been invited to attend a regional working group.
What we saw was a really inspiring story of how local stakeholders, regulators and communities can come together and make a real difference.
A typical stretch of neglected urban river had been given a new lease of life by a group of volunteers with a mini-digger and a lorry load of gravel.
There were new habitats for fish, including gravel formed pools and shallows and a re-profiled bank. (The Environment Agency video on the scheme is well worth a look by the way). One of the most significant costs involved in doing the work? A lorry load of gravel.
The resulting conversation led to me saying “my father-in-law manages a quarry”…… “and I bet they have spare material”. My limited experience told me there is always spare material (overburden and unsuitable rock, commonly known as spoil) that might do the job.
Unfortunately, the quarry in question is over 60 miles from Lyme Brook, but the principal of looking for donations or cheaper secondary material was met with enthusiasm. So, I left hoping that my suggestion might help get more of these schemes up and running, bring companies on board, while also helping to reduce the cost of these worthwhile habitat-improvement projects.
Fast forward a year, during my first month at National Grid and I am invited to a meeting to discuss a planned tunnel in the Northwest of England. After about an hour, the question of what to do with around 1 million tonnes of spoil from the project was raised.
I was already aware of the company’s sustainability target to reuse or recycle 100% of recovered assets by 2020, so reusing the material in a productive way seemed like a clear success.
The challenge was how to make the most sustainable and beneficial use of it.
Remembering Lyme Brook, I told the group about how even a small volume could make such a positive contribution, not only to the local environment, but for external stakeholders, communities and for the business itself.
So, the question of how to facilitate those links became the creation of a sustainable spoil reuse framework and led to a year of engaging with as many potential stakeholders as possible.
There was a simple premise… “Dear stakeholder, if we have excess spoil, could we ask whether you have any projects in the area that might make use of it”… In practice though, it was anything but simple.
Identifying and engaging with the right contacts in an organisation, making the opportunity understood, dealing with questions on logistics, transportation and waste management were just a few of the hurdles.
This is where the framework itself brought me full circle to that day in Newcastle-under-Lyme — from gaining the invaluable support of the Environment Agency; to presenting the framework to the working group involving Seven Trent Water); to discussing the best communication route for reaching the numerous CaBA partnerships.
The result? A framework of over 20 organisations that are willing to be contacted if any spoil becomes available.
So far, that has amounted to five opportunities; one of which includes the potential donation of 26,000 tonnes of subsoil to help a local wildlife trust improve habitats around a flooded quarry.
The latest is the agreed donation of 10 tonnes of topsoil from our North Sea Link project — an electricity cable from Norway which comes ashore at Blyth in Northumberland. It’s going to benefit Northumberlandia, the curvaceous country park formed by “a stunning human landform sculpture of a reclining lady”, constructed as part of an open cast coal mine restoration project.
It’s certainly a small amount and by chance, it’s almost exactly the same as the volume used at Lyme Brook. But in a sense, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that previously disparate organisations and sectors are having conversations that can result in real differences being made, not only for their own benefit, but for their communities and environment.
I’d certainly rather have a hundred conversations and challenge those numerous hurdles to deliver one Lyme Brook.
So this was no spoiled journey, but one that has highlighted the important principals of both sustainability and partnership working in bringing real opportunities and benefits.
Not convinced? Just take a look at Lyme Brook and Northumberlandia, think of all the benefits that have been realised and consider what has been achieved using some leftover rock and soil.
If you are part of an organisation that would like to be involved in a spoil reuse project, you can get in touch with the team here.
