Plant Decommissioning Contractors

The plant next door keeps running. That is the job.

Demolishing a dead factory is easy. Removing line 2 while lines 1 and 3 keep producing, without dust in the product, vibration in the calibrated equipment or a dropped beam across the only forklift route, is the actual skill in plant decommissioning. It starts with isolation. Every service into the removal zone gets identified, isolated, proven and tagged with your operations team before anything is cut. Then the removal runs in a sequence built around your production calendar, not around what suits the machine.

When a plant or line is being retired for good, the work broadens: isolation and make safe, hazardous material removal, process cleaning, dismantling, structural demolition, scrap recovery and site validation. We take that whole scope under one contract, and the recovered steel is weighed and credited openly against the price. For the heavy structural side of the work see industrial demolition.

What we take out

Shutdown windows

Fixed windows are normal in this work: a two week shutdown where the removal must be finished when production restarts. We plan those with redundancy, spare crew, spare gear and a sequence with float, because the window does not move for anyone. A day of lost production at a cement plant, a refinery or a processing facility costs more than the entire demolition package, so the programme is built backwards from the restart date. For the detail on how we run inside a shutdown, including a worked twelve day example, see shutdown and turnaround demolition.

The scrap is part of the price

Industrial plant carries serious recovery value: structural steel, stainless, copper, motors and sometimes resaleable equipment. We weigh it, document it and credit it against the contract, and we flag anything worth more standing than scrapped. At the Manildra flour mill the equipment on top of the bins was lifted off and set aside for the mill before a wall came down. See steel recycling and scrap recovery for how the credit is worked out.

Hazmat in older plants

Asbestos gaskets and lagging, lead paint on steel, contaminated residues in vessels. Standard in anything built before the nineties. Our own Class A friable asbestos licence and hazmat crews mean a find changes the day, not the programme, and there is no second contractor to wait for. Process residues that are toxic in their own right, like the arsenic in a BIOX plant or the cyanide circuit in a gold processing plant, are priced and handled as part of the decommissioning, not discovered halfway through.

What a job like this looks like

The Burwood decommissioning on Parramatta Road is a fair example of plant coming out over something that cannot stop. The Acciona Ferrovial joint venture needed the Beirut acoustic shed and its internal structures removed from above a live Sydney Metro station box, between October 2024 and March 2025, while tunnelling and shaft work carried on underneath.

The sequence was set by what was below, not by what was quickest. Programme windows for crane access were shared with the tunnelling logistics, and our supervision was co-located with the client's operations team so every lift was agreed before it happened. The shed came apart in reverse sequence: cladding, then purlins, then structural steel, with dual crane lifts for the roof and wall panels. Inside, columns, footings and in-shed concrete came out with oxy cutting, shear separation and vibration controlled breaking, with the capping beams, anchors and shotcrete walls protected throughout. The job finished three weeks ahead of programme with 98 percent of the material recycled and no harm to anyone. The full write up is on the Burwood decommissioning project page.

Decommissioning jobs we have done

Power and infrastructure plant: Munmorah Power Station for Downer, the Rozelle acoustic sheds lifted out with a 650 tonne crawler crane, and the Burwood shed described above.

Process plant: the Cleanaway liquid waste tank farm at Unanderra, five weeks from pre-start inspection of every tank and line to a validated handover, and the Manildra flour mill in Orange after an explosion.

Government assets: three core sample libraries at Gunnedah, Gulgong and Yerrinbool decommissioned for the NSW Government, with the samples worth keeping re-strapped and relocated to the client's laboratory and the rest disposed of through local facilities.

Plant by plant

We have written up how specific plant types come out safely, licence by licence and hazard by hazard: coal handling and preparation plants, gold processing plants, BIOX plants, cement plants, asphalt plants, concrete batching plants and substations and small power stations. For wind and solar assets reaching end of life see renewable energy decommissioning, and for the demolition input into a mine closure study see closure study input.

Where we work

Head office and yard in Marrickville, Sydney, a Queensland yard in Slacks Creek, Brisbane, and crews that travel to every state and territory. Travel, accommodation and float are built into the price up front. Industrial demolition by city: Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.

Questions we get asked