Australasian Specialty Coatings installs flooring in some of the harshest environments around.
Waste Transfer Stations are where the putrescible waste – the red bins – from metro centres are brought by garbage trucks to be compacted for transfer to landfill sites.
The garbage trucks empty their loads onto the tipping shed floor. This means the floor surface has to deal with acids, caustics, cleaning chemicals, food juices, and all the other liquids from waste.
This combined liquid, called leachate, chemically attacks the floor surface. At the same time, a front-end loader pushes the piles of rubbish across the floor, abrading the surface with the steel bucket and all the hard, sharp and rough items from the
rubbish pile.
This is enough to rapidly degrade any concrete slab, sometimes by up to 20mm every year.
Aggregate is used in combination with a high-pressure blaster to remove excess dirt, and chemicals & get into pitted concrete in order to clean it out.
Aggregate is then blown down & removed in order to ensure the concrete is clean & ready to be installed.
After assessing the performance of the trial sections over a period of 6 months, we were contracted to resurface the whole shed.
The floor was split into sections to allow the transfer station to keep operating throughout the flooring works, and each section was designated high, medium or low wear to allow the most resources to be used in the harshest areas.
The concrete surface was pressure washed, then garnet blasted to ensure a dry, clean key for bonding the epoxy primer.
The floor material chosen was a special combination of epoxy binder with aggregates selected for their high density, durability and chemical resistance.
The work was finished on schedule and on budget, and the following years have seen tens of thousands of tons of waste across the surface.
Australasian Specialty Coatings has gone on to use the same system in other Waste Transfer Station flooring projects with great success.
