Permaban Signature® was the armoured joint of choice for the engineers of a £10 million waste transfer hub project. 

In response to the government’s recycling and composting targets Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council in the West Midlands, UK, partnered with Serco, a British government services company to build a new waste transfer station to deliver a more efficient service. 

Eagle Lane Transfer Hub is located on a 23,500m2 site with the capacity to handle 200,000 tonnes of domestic and commercial waste and recycling per year. The main building measures 4,460m2. 

Using this design of armoured joint for the first time 

Engineers MLM Consultants Ltd contacted RCR Flooring Products in early October 2012 enquiring about its unique floor joint product, Permaban Signature. They were keen to know how it could handle the rigours of a waste transfer hub setting. 

The engineers were concerned about potential impact damage to the concrete floor due to the aggressive nature of the site, and the front-loading buckets scraping across the joint.  This was the first time the engineers would be recommending this product to the main contractor, Interserve, and they wanted assurance that the product would resolve the issues of impact damage to the top edge and yet still protect the joint. 

Proving the effectiveness of Permaban Signature®

RCR Flooring Products’ rigorous research and testing was able to demonstrate how Signature’s unique half-hexagon shape creates a ‘disruptive face’, adding strength and resilience by evenly distributing weight across the joint. Because the joint does not allow vehicle wheels to drop between the edges, no damage is caused, the vehicle instead passing smoothly over the top. 

Choosing Permaban Signature can substantially reduce the lifetime costs of repairing impact-damaged floors and vehicles, and therefore proves to be an attractive benefit. 

Manufacture and delivery timescales 

It took the RCR Flooring Products team just 10 days to manufacture and deliver the 86 linear metres of Signature joint.  The floor was a 200mm deep fibre-reinforced pan finish floor construction. 

Installation 

Ensuring the installation went smoothly was a priority for RCR Flooring Products, and our technical engineer was on site giving support and advice during the installation. The flooring contractor had never used the product before yet was still able to fix it successfully and easily. It took just 3 days to lay the concrete slabs. 

To ensure that the installation was working effectively we continued to monitor the performance of the joint in the weeks following installation.
  

“We have exacting standards in our approach to projects and the materials we recommend to our clients. We were very impressed with the professionalism of the RCR Flooring Products team and the assurances of Permaban Signature’s capabilities”. 

Feroz Osman, Engineer, MLM Consulting Engineers