Keltbray Rail, Structures, Piling and Environmental were awarded accolades at the Green Apple Awards this week. Teams from Keltbray Environmental and Rail P2R GE ATF Project won Silver, and Keltbray Structures at Borough Yards and Keltbray Piling won Bronze awards.

From eco-villages to supporting waste management for Tideway, to innovation in concrete and wash water solutions, the awards are testament to the great work going on across our business.

Keltbray Environmental has been involved with some of London’s largest infrastructure and construction projects including the Thames Tideway Tunnel, Battersea Power station redevelopment and the demolition of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre.

The unit’s waste treatment process involves careful classification of materials from producing sites across the capital. This material, once deemed acceptable, is then brought a short distance to our centrally located hazardous waste treatment facilities. Biological, physical and chemical treatment processes are then utilised to lower the levels of contaminants to a suitable threshold. After it is suitable for reuse, it is loaded on to barges to be sent down river to a restoration facility, being used as a capping material or for shaping and sculpting the land in the new landforms.

The Borough Yards project gained an award for improving how concrete wash waste is managed on site. While the technology implemented was ultimately a very well designed filtration system, the application of it to manage concrete washout and re-introduce water into the concrete lorries anddistribution network successfully has huge potential.

The system enabled better management and control of concrete wash water operations to prevent pollution, and helped recover water for collection by our concrete supplier to re-introduce back into their processes. The technology chosen not only improved the environmental performance and efficiency of our concrete operations onsite, but over the duration of the project, it also paid for itself and provided financial savings.

Keltbray’s innovation in piling involved the first application of Cemfree.

Concrete manufacturing is responsible for around 10% of the global CO2 emissions and using Cemfree (cement free concrete) in the piled foundations over traditional concretes has the potential to save up to 80% in embedded carbon. This means the use of Cemfree concrete within the Piling sector has the potential to substantially reduce the carbon footprint of the construction works, without reducing the performance of the pile element.

Keltbray Piling has used Cemfree in five of its projects, achieving a new landmark for the construction industry in 2018 by installing the first ever permanent works at the Mount Pleasant project.

Keltbray Rail’s P2R GE ATF (Crossrail) project team won its award for its ‘eco-village’ installed to accommodate welfare facilities needed over the Christmas period. The project team took the opportunity to make the compound as environmentally sustainable as possible by utilising hydrogen lighting, solartainers and launching initiatives such as pledging to plant a tree for every close call recorded.