Project Overview

Project Overview

Located to the west of Hauxton village, on the M11 corridor, the site has been used as an agro-chemical manufacturing plant since the 1940s. As part of Bayer CropScience’s rationalisation of production, manufacturing at Hauxton ceased in 2004 and the company’s UK headquarters relocated to new, high tech premises. The site was used to manufacture and store a wide variety of agro-chemicals including herbicides and pesticides. The site also used many other hydrocarbon chemicals in the manufacturing process before its closure in 2004. Pollution was identifed to be causing impact on the Environment which resulted in the designation as a Special Site under Part IIa of the Environmental Protection Act which required the site to be Remediated or "cleaned up" the site.

In order to ensure that this process was appropriately managed the site was aquired by Harrow Estates PLC who are an experianced developer of brownfield sites and to ensure that the process of remediation was managed and the land was returned to beneficial use. Following acquisition by Harrow Estates PLC demolition of the site was completed in June 2008.
As part of its industrial legacy the site was subject to a determination under Part IIa of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 requiring its remediation. This remediation is also required in order to facilitate the redevelopment of the site and in accordance with a recently granted planning consent.

The remediation will focus on contaminated soils and groundwater and will involve the excavation and treatment of many thousands of tonnes of contaminated soils and the abstraction and treatment of contaminated groundwater from the site. The vast majority of soil and all groundwater is being remediated on site negating the need for the transportation of contaminated materials off site. The remediation is managed by the remediation contractor VertaseFLI under an Environmental Permit. They are supervised on site by Atkins an International Environmental Consultant. The site will ultimately be developed for residential uses following completion of the remediation works.

This remediation work was commenced on 15th March 2010 and is programmed to be complete in September 2011.

The following pages give further information on the project, its history and will be updated from time to time. Links to websites for other stakeholders and further information can also be found.

UPDATE JANUARY 2012

Following 21 months of active remediation and with over 90,000 man-hours worked since excavation commenced, the active remediation phase at the former Bayer Crop Science site has been completed.

During this period over 200,000 tonnes of contaminated soil has been treated and re-used on site and 110 million litres of water (the equivalent of 44 Olympic-sized swimming pools) treated. The site has now been restored to a development platform but before development commences on the site it will now be monitored for a minimum of six months to assess the remediation works before reports are issued to the Environment Agency and South Cambridgeshire District Council to review in order to allow development to commence.