The £50,000 Trial Pit

Budget squeezing and downward price pressure mean it is becoming harder to deliver groundworks projects with a healthy margin. Therefore, A-squared Studio Engineers were surprised to discover a client considering paying £50,000 per trial pit.

But what can you get paying £50,000 for a trial pit, you may ask? Or in this case £300,000 for six of them?

We thought we would have a go at pricing the six trial pits for our client. However, we could only value our works at around £10,000 in total. Maybe we were missing something, we thought.

A-squared sent our geo-environmental team to the site and excavated the six trial pits. We spent time accurately logging the pits and collecting representative soil samples. Everything went smoothly, and we did not find any unexpected risks in the ground worth £300,000 - no buried Roman coins, Anglo Saxon artifacts or similar.

Finally, we diligently prepared our report and issued it to the client. The client used the A-squared waste assessment to dispose of all Made Ground within the proposed basement excavation as Non-hazardous waste. The previous advice to the client provided by a Contractor had been to dispose of all Made Ground as Hazardous waste, and this is how the initial eye-wateringly high consequential cost of the trial pitting works had been derived.

To dispose of the Made Ground as Hazardous waste would have cost the client approximately £300,000 (effectively £50,000 consequential cost per trial pit). The accuracy of the A-squared waste assessment showed that there was actually no Hazardous waste and the client made a huge saving on disposal (effectively £5,000 consequential cost per trial pit). The overall commercial advantage of employing A-squared as the project geo-environmental consultant is now obvious. You get what you pay for by commissioning a specialist geo-environmental consultant to act on your behalf before engaging with a Contractor.

Contact A-squared if you are either commissioning soil disposal or a contractor undertaking soil disposal. We can consider your soil waste liability and project commercial outcome holistically. You can also contact us for an informal discussion around your requirements - freddie.kennedy@a2-studio.com.