Company homes in on inner city clearance

Welsh company homes in on inner city clearance

The third generation of a Welsh family owned demolition company have now employed a 700 Dig A Crusher bucket to aid an urban regeneration programme

With nearly 50 years of history in the demolition trade, L.G.Murphy (Swansea) Ltd. were surprised to find a new style of attachment available to incorporate into their fleet.

Director Karl Murphy saw the Dig A Crusher buckets featured in a press article. Intrigued he asked for more details and was delighted when DAC’s MD Sean Heron offered to demonstrate the attachment on site to prove it was up to the claims made for it. “We carry a lot of attachments in our fleet as it provides a value added service to our customers. We often arrive on site with shears for steel work but the crusher buckets were a new concept,” explains Karl. “We saw the potential straight away. Many of our sites are small inner city regeneration projects where we might only demolish a row of six houses. The site would be too small to bring in a mobile crushing plant and often the cost of hauling the material away was prohibitively high. With the crusher bucket we could process the waste on site, reduce it to 6F2 or type 1 and reuse it for foundation material or sub base when the new houses were constructed. The saving in lorry movements alone has been colossal .”

Ease of Use

What really intrigued Karl was the simplicity of attachment and the ease of which operators took to the crusher bucket, with even new operators had no trouble in using the buckets and everyone was highly impressed.

The company specialise in inner city sites where access is often awkward or has limited access. Another problem is noise and dust pollution to adjoining sites where the wrath of residents would soon be felt if demolition work meant an intrusion into their lives or homes, as Karl explained, “It is an ideal piece of kit for the type of work we do, perfect for inner city work where access is often very limited. However, if we can get an excavator onto the site to do the demolition, we can now crush and recycle the demolition material as well, without the cost of hauling the material away and storing it until it could be processed. The bucket is marvellous, this job is a prime example of how useful it was. We only just managed to get the excavator onto the site via the gardens at the rear. Having flattened the houses we booked the bucket out for a week to process the rubble – it took 2 days! It really wasn’t much of a fight, the Dig A Crusher just ate it up.’ He continued ‘Another excellent aspect of the bucket is how quiet it is. We can use it in an urban environment without complaints about noise, vibration or dust. We can often finish a job before local residents are aware we are on site. If we can get it in the jaws, it will crush it, we’ve used it on rebar and granite headstones from old walls and it has proved perfect for the wide variety of the work we do, one week it will be processing reinforced concrete floors, another crushing silica rock!’ He concluded, ‘The beauty of the bucket is that nothing goes off site, it saves money, transport costs, and makes us money by producing a product we can sell or recycle into other aspects of our work. Best attachment we have ever purchased, we have even had other contractors looking at the bucket when it has been operating on site. Dead easy to attach, five minutes and two pipes and away you go’