Drone pictures shows scale of £6 million clean-up by Shrewsbury firm
Drone footage has revealed how a Shrewsbury-based company completely transformed a storage site by removing more than 66,000 tonnes of illegally dumped waste.
Broad Environmental, which has an office in High Street, was drafted in to carry out one of the largest clean-ups of abandoned industrial waste ever seen in the UK.
The company was appointed to process and remove thousands of bales, which filled two huge storage units and every available inch of space around the buildings and along the canal side, from Warrington docks.
It followed the eviction of disgraced waste management company Asset and Land Group, which had intended to use the adjacent Manchester Ship Canal to send the material as a combustible fuel for use within energy from waste plants in the Nordics.
The clean-up process took Broad Environmental 18 months to complete, with a final clear-up cost totalling in excess of £6 million.
Environmental director Alistair Hilditch-Brown said: “This project was one of the largest clearances of abandoned waste seen in the UK.
"We did not have any information on the contents of the bales stored on site and no information of their provenance, this meant that we had to split open every bale to ensure that the correct handling procedures were followed and material was managed in line with waste hierarchy."
In 2013, Asset and Land Group were investigated by the Environment Agency after major fires broke out at two sites they managed in Greater Manchester.
The first fire, at a site in Stockport, lasted for 41 days and resulted in the closure of the M60 motorway and three weeks of disruption to other traffic.
Alastair added: "I am very happy with the way the project has been managed and the recovery rates that we have achieved.
"I am now happy to hand the site back to the landowners so as they can look for new tenants and begin to recover the costs they have incurred in the site clearance."
Broad Environmental has successfully completed the removal and reprocessing of over 300,000 tonnes of abandoned waste since 2016, and has contracts in place to clear a further 350,000 tonnes over the next two years.
