Artificial hills on the ECT Moissy-Cramayel site
The town hall of Moissy-Cramayel (Seine-et-Marne) will soon be inaugurating a park created entirely from recycled soil.
What to do with soil excavated from construction sites ?
In a few weeks’ time, the town hall of Moissy-Cramayel (Seine-et-Marne) will inaugurate a park created entirely from recycled soil. In twenty years or more, as the zones are depleted, the gypsum galleries exploited by Placo in the Ile-de-France region will be filled with the same soil. It makes good sense to use the spoil excavated from all construction sites to fill in or backfill. This is not the rule. Long gone are the days of the engineers of Haussmann’s Paris “who had a culture of excavation and earthworks”, as architect Antoine Grumbach puts it. At the time, the soil excavated for the metro was used to build the parks.
As a leader in the collection and processing of these soils, ECT uses this form of recycling whenever possible. The least visible but most spectacular technique is that used to backfill gypsum galleries after they have been mined. The Ile-de-France region is a very good source of these deposits, from which Placo, a division of Saint-Gobain, extracts the plaster used to make its famous building boards. Since 2000, quarrymen have been obliged to backfill what they have dug, in order to avoid tunnel collapse].
