Elstow Waste Transfer Station

The waste transfer facility at Elstow, Bedfordshire has been constructed on an old landfill site. Settlement is inevitable due to the degradation of the waste. To accommodate this settlement the facility has been constructed on a flexible granular filled geocell raft foundation with the intension to ‘smooth out’ differential settlement in particular between adjacent structural column foundations. To reduce the risk of damaging the structural integrity of the building, a facility to adjust the column lengths was incorporated in the design of the building superstructure. Ongoing level monitoring of the column base plates was required to determine the nature and when remedial action was required. Since its construction in 1998 Stirling Maynard have been carrying out levelling monitoring on an annual basis. In September 2011 a review by Stirling Maynard of the monitoring concluded that structural adjustment works were required to relieve adverse forces that had built up in the steel frame due to differential settlement.