FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

And it turned out to be money well spent. Our recycling plant is used as a model for other developers … That’s something to be proud of.

had made up my mind already. He turned to Jon and said: ‘I’ve got to tell you something. That’s the crusher he’s going to buy.’ But Jon was not so sure. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He walked away from it.’ I can’t remember when I made up my mind, but I think perhaps Roy was right. At the end of the afternoon, I told them that there was something I wanted to look at again, and we walked all the way back to have another long look at that first machine. And that was more or less it. We placed our order with Anthony Donnelly of SBM, based in Austria, and the crusher was delivered to Rochester Way, our new home, at the end of 2001. We’d been given permission to crush 200,000 tonnes of material a year. One of the conditions was that we would build a bunker wall around the crusher to minimise the noise for the neighbours. We built the bunker wall, of course, but I later heard about an acoustic barrier that we could stick on top of the wall to reduce the noise even further. The acoustic barrier didn’t come cheap, and it would bring the bunker up to a total height of about seven metres, but it was supposed to be pretty good. So, we did some tests (tests that we still repeat every six months) and found that, with all the acoustic shielding, the crusher wouldn’t be heard above the ambient noise of the traffic on the neighbouring roads. And it turned out to be money well spent. Our recycling plant is used as a model for other developers: both Bexley and Dartford Councils still send other people to look at what we have achieved on this site. That’s something to be proud of.

As soon as we had housed our people and our plant, we set about constructing our new Recycling Plant. The whole area was just mud at the start.

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