NEWS

Doing our bit for Road Safety

Our specialist Road Rehabilitation crews can be seen all over the country making the roads safer by removing the 'bled tar' from the carriageway. As demonstrated, by these photos of a crew in the BOP, our in house designed UHP mower cuts the excess tar from the road surface, vacuums the waste and leaves the surface with more profile and friction. These rehabilitated roads normally return to close to their original friction coefficients greatly improving skid resistance and allowing rain water to run off the road surface faster thereby improving the driver’s view of the carriageway.

This is a dangerous job so please respect the road work speed limits when approaching our, or any other contractors, staff on your journey as they are working to make your trip safer.

New Treatment Plant opening in Christchurch

Air from inside Interclean's treatment plant is sucked outside the building by vents and forced up through the wet bark in the bin which sits alongside the shed. Microbes that live in the bark then eat the sulphides that cause the smell and the remaining clean air is absorbed back into the atmosphere.
"This is a completely natural process that has also found favour with sewer treatment plants and other treatment plants where there is a smell factor," says Gray.
He says the company's neighbours were initially apprehensive about the new plant and there were "a lot of meetings and hearings" before everyone, including ECan was satisfied.
"We are very happy with the performance of the bio-filter system now that it is up and running. There is no smell outside the shed at all."
The aim of the treatment plant inside the shed is to remove the 80% of water that makes up grease trap waste. To achieve this, the waste is treated with lime to balance the pH before a flocculent is added to separate the solids from the water content in the waste. It is then passed through a Simon Moos system, which is a large dewatering container on the back of a truck that sieves off the sludge.
The water run-off is then pumped into holding tanks and released back into the sewer system after it has met the testing requirements of the Christchurch City Council.
The remaining 20% of solid material is mixed with untreated sawdust and dumped at Kate Valley.
"We are currently looking at a couple of options for recycling this solid material into a compost product so that we can achieve 100% recycling of the waste," says Gray.
Before it commissioned the new treatment plant, Interclean used to dump the entire grease-trap waste collected from its clients.
"The plant has enabled us to operate at best practice in terms of environmental benefits. It has also given us more control over our pricing, as our dumping costs have been significantly reduced."
Interclean is now "aggressively" promoting its grease-trap waste treatment service to the market.
"The plant has been a big investment for the company but we believe that the cost and environmental benefits ensure us of a strong position in the market."

The old saying, "it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it," could relate directly to industrial services company Interclean and its subsidiary Ace Drainage Contracting Ltd.
The Christchurch-based companies do the jobs that are either too time consuming, too hazardous, or too difficult for its client base across the city.
These range from water jetting, vacuum loading, drainage maintenance, semi-solid and liquid waste disposal and meeting the complexities of food industry cleaning requirements, through to graffiti removal and abrasive blasting and painting.
Interclean was formed in 1976 in Auckland by industrial services specialist Alan Hill.
In 2005 the Christchurch division of Interclean was established at its current Bromley site. A year later, Hill purchased neighbouring business Ace Drainage Contracting Ltd.
Ace operates as a subsidiary of Interclean and is responsible for providing a range of commercial semi-solid and liquid waste disposal services. These include grease-trap cleaning, septic tank cleaning, vacuum service, toxic chemical waste removal, environmental cleanups and cleaning out lift wells.
Its clients are a diverse mix including restaurants, takeaway businesses, supermarkets, butchers, rest homes, hospitals, flour mills, the packaging industry and City Care for whom it provides flooding, septic, dirty water, sumps and storm water disposal.
"Ace Drainage handles the nastier side of our waste disposal services, including hazardous and dangerous goods," says Interclean's operations manager Allan Gray.
When it comes to Interclean, Gray says that water jetting technology is a particular area of expertise.
It has a range of high and ultra-high pressure jetting units from 6000 - 40,000 psi (operating pressure) and discharge rates of up to 300 litres per minute.
These units are used for a range of water-blasting services including drainage maintenance, cleaning, de-scaling and paint removal.
The company also offers abrasive blasting and painting of large components both on-site and off-site, servicing a range of clients including industrial, fuel, storage and marine.
"We carried out abrasive blasting and painting of some big components on site at Synlait's new plant and just completed some fuel tanks at Annex Road. We often blast and paint machinery and plant for our industrial clients."
Interclean also removes graffiti from City Care's pump stations which is another abrasive blasting application.
The company operates a fleet of vacuum loading vehicles to service holding tanks, cesspits, soakage pits, sumps, wash-bays and interceptors.
Gray says that the Liquid Ring pump is "the ultimate in vacuum" that can be used for numerous applications.
"It is one of the biggest pumps in the South Island, if not the biggest. It has almost unlimited uses and can be used anywhere that material needs to be sucked up. We recently used this unit with a six inch hose to suck out some of the pods underneath the filtration system at QEII pool."
As one of the largest industrial services and water jetting companies in New Zealand with more than three decades in the business, Gray says that Interclean is able to "provide New Zealand and our Pacific Rim neighbours with high levels of expertise and the most up to date technology."
"We are intent on maintaining our leadership status in the industry whilst assuring ongoing enterprise and profitability."