Airfield to Wildlife Haven! What happened to the airfield?

What would YOU do if you were in charge of getting rid of: Over 3 ½ km of runway? Over 235 acres of hard surfaces? (118 football pitches!) Nearly 160,000 square metres of building space? 13.5 km of buried pipelines? 13.5 km of fencing? This was the challenge set for ‘Raymond Brown’ the company chosen to restore Greenham Common!

Not only did all this need to be removed, but some areas of grassland on the airfield had to be left alone as lots of wildlife already lived there!

Another challenge was to recycle and re-use as much as possible, so that hardly any of the removed materials went to a landfill site. Quite a challenge don’t you think?... This is how they did it!

Removing runways This is a ‘Shearbreaker.’ A heavy bar on the back of this lorry bangs onto the concrete, breaking it up. Big drills on these diggers also break up the concrete runway First, the concrete runways had to be broken up…

Tarmac trouble! In some places, there was tarmac laid on top of the concrete. A special machine stripped this off, so that this too could be re-used as well as the concrete underneath

Now what do we do with it? Once the concrete has been broken up, it is in huge lumps, which cannot be used. These need to be broken up into smaller pieces

Let’s CRUSH it! The enormous lumps are taken to a huge crusher, which smashes them up into smaller pieces. These are then ‘sieved’ and sorted into piles of different sized pieces. Digger putting concrete lumps in the crusher CrusherPiles of crushed concrete more about crushing on the next page…

Can you see the lumps of concrete being loaded into the crusher? The crushed rock comes out on a conveyor belt. If smaller bits are needed, the concrete goes into a second crusher The crushed concrete is taken along a belt and piled up

Can we recycle it? YES we can! All the concrete removed was graded and tested to make sure it was top quality. Most of it was, so it was all recycled and used to make new roads and buildings. You drive on some of these materials as they were used to make the A34! There was so much recycled concrete from this site, that it meant a new quarry did not need to be opened. How brilliant is that?!

Recycling facts The quarrying industry has been working hard to recycle their materials. This graph shows that in 2006 more than a quarter of all aggregates (sand and gravel and crushed rock used for construction) were from recycled sources and it’s improving all the time!

Fuel tank problems When there was an airfield at Greenham, fuel for the planes had to be stored. Fuel was piped into huge storage tanks made of metal and concrete, some were buried under ground. These tanks had to be dug out of the ground and removed. Look how big they were compared to a car!

One of the huge tanks Look at the size of the boy for scale!

Fuel leakage Look how big this hole is! Some of the fuel in the tanks had leaked into the soil over many years, leaving it poisoned and unsuitable for animals and plants. It ALL had to be removed.

but where does the polluted soil go? The easiest way to deal with the polluted soil was to fill up hundreds of lorries and take it all to a landfill site... This, however, was very expensive and not very environmentally friendly… A much better way was to let ‘nature’ do the job! The soil was spread out over a large area and turned over regularly by diggers. Microbes in the soil ‘ate’ away at the poisons, breaking them down, eventually leaving the soil safe again!

but what could be done with the polluted sand and gravel? The cleaned soil could then be put back onto the common to help new plants grow But what about the sand and gravel under the soil, some of which had also been contaminated with fuel?

Sand and gravel Tarmac, the quarrying company, removed and cleaned the contaminated sand and gravel Tarmac also removed over a million tonnes of clean sand and gravel Through restoration work they created a new and rare area of heathland on Greenham Common and a special habitat for wildlife

How did they do this? To avoid using the local roads, the sand and gravel was taken over fields using a temporary road, to the processing plant at their Chamber House Farm quarry The quarry is near Thatcham Discovery Centre – the lakes and reed beds here were created by quarrying sand and gravel in the past The sand and gravel from Greenham Common was stored in a big stock pile near the plant The quarry has been using this sand and gravel from Greenham Common for almost ten years

Sand and gravel The sand and gravel is taken from the stockpile, crushed, washed and graded into different sizes It is used to make concrete and by construction companies to build houses, schools, hospitals and roads The average house uses 60 tonnes of aggregate when it is built The consumption per person in the UK of aggregates is 4.8 tonnes per year.

Processing plant

Keeping the neighbours happy! This whole restoration project took nearly FOUR years! It was important to make sure local people were disturbed as little as possible from… NOISE! DUST ! TRAFFIC! Smashing up concrete and crushing it can be VERY noisy, especially if you live nearby! Luckily the heavy machinery was moved around the site, so people didn’t mind as they did not hear it for long The diggers all had little ‘sprayers’ on them that sprayed water, dampening things down, so dust did not travel through the air The lorries coming and going from the site could only use big roads and not little, local roads. They were cleaned before leaving the site, so they did not put mud onto the local roads

So what now?... Wildlife has always been present on Greenham Common, but now, as new plants grow on areas that used to be runway and buildings, then more wildlife is returning. Cattle and ponies graze some areas, to keep the grass down so other plants can grow. Restored in an environmentally friendly way, Greenham Common is now a lovely place for everyone to visit... why not go and see for yourself!