A kind offer from Active Workwear has just spiced things up in our Demolition City contest.

Last week, Demolition News was at its busiest ever, but not because of any Pulitzer-prize winning writing or tabloid-style expose. No. The reason for all the excitement and comment was a simple online game called Demolition City that allows players to act out their wildest explosives engineering fantasies, imploding a series of ever-more-complex structures using a predetermined number of explosive charges.

Well, we thought that was probably exciting enough. And judging by the number of comments we received both here and over on Twitter (www.twitter.com/demolitionnews), we were probably right.

However, those very nice people over at Active Workwear, purveyors of fine work and safety wear for the more discerning customer, have just spiced things up by offering a free pair of site safety boots to the person achieving the highest score by 31 July 2009.

Details of how to play the FREE game can be found by clicking here. Alternatively, you can read the Active Workwear blog by clicking here to find out more about their very generous offer.

Buckingham Group’s preparatory works are underway at Fontwell Park racecourse.

The £6.5m project for Client Northern Racing, will create an architecturally prominent three-storey building with twelve private hospitality boxes, a glass fronted hospitality restaurant for 250 people and a multi-purpose hall on the ground floor with new catering and betting facilities. An external terrace area provides a mixture of seating/standing capacity for around 1,200 people.

Early enabling operations currently underway require the construction of a temporary race control tower and the careful relocation of a stone/timber domed folly. Buckingham’s in-house demolition team will then undertake asbestos removal and demolition of the former 1920’s grandstand building.
As well as offering state of the art facilities on race days, the Premier Grandstand has been designed for weddings, banqueting, conferences and exhibitions. Race meetings will continue to take place during the construction period. The new Grandstand is scheduled to open for the Ladies Evening race meeting in August 2010.

Paul Wheeler, Buckingham Group Chairman said: “We are delighted to have been awarded this prestigious project and look forward to working closely with our client to deliver an exceptional viewing and hospitality facility. This latest successful tender further enhances our portfolio of recently secured contracts in the South of England adding to projects such as the £67m Community Stadium at Brighton, the £16m East Kent Re-Signalling Contract for Network Rail, and a £12m Regional Distribution Centre, now approaching completion for the Food Services Company 3663 in Paddock Wood. We still have plenty of capacity, and remain committed to continued growth in all of our Sectors, including Sports and Leisure

Video showing the demolition of a high school building in Lorain, Ohio.

The beginning of the end of Lorain High began yesterday with the demolition of a gym built the year President John F. Kennedy was killed. By December, the entire 1,800 m2-plus school, which started in a four-room building where the first diplomas were awarded to three graduates in 1879, will be gone.

Read the full story here or simply watch the video, below.

DEFRA unveils new consultation on revised Waste Framework Directive.

The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has issued a new consultation on the revised Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC) for England and Wales.

Further details can be found by clicking here while a copy of the consultation document in pdf format can be downloaded by hitting the link (below).

Consultation Document

The number of hits on the Demolition Jobs website escalate as the recession bites.

www.demolition-jobs.co.uk, the website established by the National Federation of Demolition Contractors to help unemployed demolition workers advertise their availability to work to prospective employers, has seen a jump in traffic levels during the past month, underlining fears that the recession is impacting upon the industry’s workforce.

“We monitor the site statistics very closely and we have seen a very sharp increase in levels over the past few weeks,” says the site’s co-founder Mark Anthony. “I have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, I am pleased that this free service is proving popular and that the thinking behind it was sound. But the fact that more people are now having to use it suggests that job losses are on the rise. Frankly, I’d love to see the site fail because the industry was sufficiently bouyant to provide full employment.”

Another key fact is the level of qualification of many of the site’s users. “When we initially discussed the site, I think we were all expecting it to be used primarily by site operatives, partly because there are more of them but also because many of them are of an age where Internet use is more common,” Anthony continues. “But the registrants on the site at present are generally individuals with more ‘managerial’ experience. The site currently has a contracts manager, a demolition manager and a pair of site supervisors actively seeking work.”

Anthony says that, although the site’s traffic stats are telling, he’s unwilling to draw specific conclusions about geographic downturns. “The site has certainly received more registrations from the NFDC’s London & Southern Counties Region but I am sure that’s due, at least in part, to the fact that this is traditionally the biggest area for employment in the UK demolition sector,” he concludes.

A straw poll by the National Skip Hire & Recycling Association reveals price differential.

A lack of standardisation on the cost of skip permits is allowing some local authorities to charge ludicrous sums, according to a new straw poll from the National Skip Hire and Recycling Association. Indeed, based upon a sample of 18 local authorities selected at random, permit fees vary from no charge in Leicester up to a staggering £26 per day PLUS a £72 application fee in Kensington and Chelsea.

Full details of the random poll’s findings can be found here.

What is the most unusual thing you’ve uncovered on a demolition site?

There is nothing more likely to get a demolition contractor on the TV or onto the front page of a newspaper than an unusual or unexpected on-site discovery, particularly if the contractor is unlucky enough to unearth unexploded ordnance or, worse, human remains.

But having read recently about a waste management company that received a skip load of new bras for disposal, we were wondering: What is the most unusual thing you’ve uncovered on a demolition site?

We don’t care how weird or inappropriate it is, or even if it’s only a story you’ve heard from a fellow demolition man. And we’d be even more pleased if you have photographic evidence of your unusual finding.

And just by way of an incentive, we’ll pull together a goodie bag of “stuff” for the most unusual entry.

Please just hit the blue comment tab (below) or send us an email: manthony@markanthonypublicity.co.uk

You know things are bad when the construction business gets its own stress toy!

Here at Demolition News Towers, we receive all manner of goodies (most of which we then give away as competition prizes). In recent months, we’ve had machine models, enough USB thumb drives to store the sum of man’s knowledge, more umbrellas than an average day at Wimbledon and considerably more baseball caps than we have heads.

However, every once in a while, we receive a package that takes us all by surprise; and that was the case this morning when our postman pitched up carrying a box from Make Mine A Builders, a construction trade specific brand of tea (our overseas readers can probably stop reading now – we realise that tea is a very British thing!)

In amongst a box containing tea, a thermal flask, a mug, a t-shirt and the ubiquitous USB was a rubber stress toy that just about sums up the current state of the market.

Professional Demolition International has covered the launch of www.demolition-jobs.co.uk.

In the past, we have made no secret of our support for the www.demolition-jobs.co.uk initiative to safeguard UK demolition jobs and to help employees advertise their availability to work. So we’re delighted to see that Professional Demolition International magazine (PDI) has chosen to cover the scheme in its latest issue:

Earth Exchange website facilitating exchange of building materials shows increase in demand.

An award-winning website created to facilitate the exchange of surplus construction or reusable demolition materials has reported a marked increase in levels of materials exchanged.

Earth Exchange® (www.earthexchange.com) uses a time based map system on which users can enter their current and future construction projects and say what materials they have surplus or require.

The website easily identifies where other construction sites are or will be, who is operating there, what and when surplus materials are available and which sites have a deficit in materials. This allows the user the opportunity to match his site with local sites which have surplus/deficit of materials.

The latest headline figures suggest that materials reuse as a result of the Earth Exchange® website is on a steady and increasingly upward trend:

• Materials exchanged (virgin materials saved): 92,000 m3 (ca. 156,000 tonnes)
• Materials diverted from landfill: 48,000 m3 (ca 81,000 tonnes)
• Road haulage distance saved: 460,000 km (285,840 miles)
• CO2 emissions saved as a result of reduced road haulage: 433.5 tonnes
• Total approximate cost savings to users of Earth Exchange®: £4,215,000

“These headline figures are extremely encouraging and we are pleased that Earth Exchange® is making a tangible difference to the construction materials reuse issue and is streamlining the sustainable procurement process,” says operations director Alex Albion. “We, of course, also have to remember that users of the website are not required to leave feedback, so in all likelihood the amount of materials that have actually been exchanged and cost savings realised with the help of Earth Exchange® are considerably more than that presented.”

“The construction industry is having a hard time at the moment, but the figures show that users of Earth Exchange® have a definite competitive advantage over those construction and demolition companies which are not using our system. Using Earth Exchange® has the potential to make a real difference to the bottom line of any construction project, as well as improve the key environmental performance indicators for a project,” Albion concludes. “As we hopefully start to see a recovery in the construction sector we would expect to see many more housing and commercial developers, their contractors as well as more civil engineering and demolition firms join Earth Exchange® and add to the number of sites on our mapped database.”