Industrial Demolition Contractors

Industrial demolition is a different trade to knocking down a building

An industrial site comes with things a commercial building does not. Plant that may still be live next door. Process residues in tanks and pipework. Asbestos lagging on everything that ran hot. Heavy steel that is worth money if it is cut properly and worth nothing if it is not. Ground that has had decades of whatever the plant made soaked into it. The method has to deal with all of that in the right order: isolate and decommission, clean and certify the vessels, strip the hazmat, dismantle the steel and structure with plant matched to the weight, then finish with the slabs, footings and ground.

We have been doing this since 2010. The jobs on our books run from a power station on the NSW Central Coast and a heritage coke works in Corrimal to a liquid waste tank farm in Unanderra, an explosion damaged flour mill in Orange and a working water treatment plant in Muswellbrook. Each one is written up on its own page with the method, the plant and the photos.

Where we work

Our head office and plant yard are in Marrickville, Sydney, and our Queensland yard is in Slacks Creek, Brisbane, so high reach plant floats from our own yards to anywhere on the east coast. We run industrial demolition in Sydney, Newcastle and the Hunter, Wollongong and the Illawarra, Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, and we mobilise nationally for plant, power and mine work. Regional and remote sites are priced with the travel, accommodation and float shown as their own lines, so you can see exactly what the distance costs.

If the job is a conventional building rather than plant, our full building demolition pages cover that. For mine sites see mine demolition and closure, and for an operating plant that needs a section removed inside a fixed shutdown window see shutdown and turnaround demolition.

What the package includes

The plant we bring

We own the machines, so the programme is not waiting on a hire yard. The fleet runs from sub one tonne excavators that fit through a doorway up to 35 tonne excavators with shears, pulverisers and hammers, high reach excavators for stacks and tall frames, Brokk remote demolition machines for the places people should not stand, and our own hook trucks, tippers and skips to keep the waste moving. Crawler cranes are brought in for the lifts that need them, like the 650 tonne crane we used on the Rozelle acoustic sheds.

What a job like this looks like

The Cleanaway tank farm at Unanderra, south of Wollongong, is a fair example of a mid sized industrial job. A shed full of steel and plastic process tanks, reactors, pumps, overhead pipe racks and an exhaust stack had to come out, and the site had to be handed back clean. It ran five weeks, from May to June 2025, and the client signed the scope off as complete on the last day.

The order of work was set by the risk, not by what was easiest to reach. First, a pre-start inspection of every tank and line to confirm isolation and decontamination before any cutting. Then gas testing around pipes and tanks before hot work. The overhead pipework came down first from elevated work platforms, so nothing was hanging over the crews when the tanks were cut. The tanks, reactors and pumps followed, sectioned to a size the trucks could take and sorted for steel credit against plastic for disposal. The stack came down last. With the shed empty, the slab and the ground underneath were dealt with as remediation and the site was validated for handover. It was our first Cleanaway site and we have worked on several more since.

Industrial jobs we have done

Power and water: Munmorah Power Station for Downer, where gantry towers were dismantled and craned down under a licence for structural work above 15 metres, and the Muswellbrook water treatment plant, nine weeks of asbestos, biohazard and structural work on the town's only drinking water supply while it kept running.

Heavy industry: the Corrimal Coke Works for Legacy Property, 22 months as principal contractor on a heritage site with over 95 percent of demolition material recycled; the Manildra flour mill in Orange for CJ Duncan, dismantling a section wrecked by an explosion while salvaging the equipment the mill wanted back; and the Cleanaway tank farm at Unanderra described above.

Infrastructure plant: the Rozelle acoustic sheds and the Five Dock acoustic shed for Sydney Metro, the Chatswood North dive site, and Roma Street Station in Brisbane for Cross River Rail.

Warehouses and sites for redevelopment: three warehouses in Mascot, the warehouse at 13 Grand Avenue, Camellia, the Auburn stabling yard warehouse, six months of demolition and bioremediation at Emu Plains for Akura, and the fire damaged Cleanaway facility at St Marys.

Questions we get from industrial clients