Michelin tyres

Michelin’s decision to decommission its Dundee site required removal of all redundant machinery, totalling assets with a combined weight in excess of 2,400 tonnes. The project also involved demolition of the site’s buildings and redundant production facilities, with demolition waste totalling 8,000 tonnes.

The initial brief for AIS Vanguard was to remove two redundant tyre manufacturing lines. During this phase a further contract to remove an additional two lines and equipment within the same facility was awarded and AIS Vanguard was then also approached to safely remove many other standalone pieces of equipment from the Dundee plant for onward transport and installation at other Michelin facilities throughout Europe.

Scope of work

The work was carried out over a five-month period and the site was split into two zones, with AIS Vanguard working as Principal Contractor and Principal Designer for both locations, including full CDM responsibility. Activity for both zones was delivered simultaneously.

The demolition requirements included five buildings, comprising a tank farm, a solvent store, two production facilities and a boiler house, along with a 55m chimney stack. Demolition requirements also included a number of canopied link bridges between buildings, which contained services and conveyors that had to be removed and conserved for future use. A complete c.500m pipe bridge was also dismantled.

Some of the redundant production equipment, which had been assessed as too uneconomical to remove by hand, was also demolished prior to removal from site.

A variety of equipment used...

Decommissioned and removed from site, ranging from overhead conveyors to large mills and roll beds. Some of these assets weighed in excess of 70 tonnes and the AIS Vanguard team utilised a variety of lifting gear to carry out the project, including various fork lift trucks, MEWPS, Valla cranes, Ormig pick and carry cranes, Versalifts and a 400T Gantry system.

Careful project and safety planning was required from the AIS Vanguard team to address some of the site’s inherent challenges and ensure that the project ran smoothly without delays or interruption. Because some of the buildings had been handed over to their new tenants, the AIS Vanguard team had to plan routes around ingress and egress limitations, due to low floor loadings in some places. Safe isolation and disconnection of primary and secondary services was also challenging due to limited information on existing service routes, and the team overcame this by tracing back supplies to ensure the correct service networks were isolated.

The facility was very dark, which created integral hazards that had to be managed with careful planning, effective communication and a meticulous approach to safety.

A briefing was carried out on a daily basis to ensure the whole team understood the planned schedule of works for the day and the safe working procedures that needed to be maintained. This included managing safe delivery of the project within COVID-19 guidance and restrictions.