Last fall, on the Viau sector work site, the soil encapsulation mobile factory did not pass unnoticed. As high as four containers, it swallowed up the crushed soils and mixed them with cement, to produce a thick, malleable material that was spread on the bottom of the excavated ground.
The aim of the operation was to solidify this area that covers close to nine hectares so it could accommodate containers. To be able to withstand the weight of containers piled three to four deep along with lifting equipment and trucks, the ground must be extremely stable. However, the ground in the Viau sector was too soft to solidify simply by compacting it. Normally, 44,000 metric tonnes of poor soil would have been extracted, and replaced with a noble soil made mainly of crushed stone that we would have brought in from a quarry.
Instead, Port of Montreal turned to soil encapsulation, which made it possible to re-use the 44,000 tonnes of extracted inferior soil by mixing it with cement to give it the necessary weight-carrying capacity, and returning it to where it had been excavated from.
By doing so, the Port saved a minimum of 170 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding trips that would otherwise have been made to quarries and landfill sites.