What to do before a plant
closure or line removal

The decisions are made before demolition starts

Once a clearance contractor mobilizes, the material is moving on their schedule and under their method. Whatever separation was not planned beforehand will not happen, because separating on the fly costs them time they have not priced.

This is why closure planning is worth doing early even when the date is uncertain. The inventory does not expire.

Inventory the equipment before the people leave

The most perishable asset in a closure is knowledge. Maintenance staff know which machines run, what the tanks held, where the asbestos is and which drums came from where. Once they transfer or leave, that information is reconstructed slowly and expensively.

An equipment and material inventory taken while the site is still staffed is the single highest-value hour in the process.

Separate the high-value metal from the clearance

Clearance contracts frequently bundle scrap value into a single price for emptying the building. That is convenient and it is usually expensive, because specialty alloys, copper, motors and transformers are worth considerably more marketed by grade than absorbed into a lump sum.

Separating the valuable metal out of the clearance scope is the commonest large saving in a decommissioning.

Equipment is worth more running than scrapped

Machines in working order have a resale market. So do transformers, compressors, tanks and material handling equipment. The determining factor is usually whether anyone was given time to find a buyer before the demolition date.

This is another argument for starting early: resale takes weeks, and a demolition schedule does not wait.

Deal with the regulated material first

Chemical inventories, unlabeled containers, tank heels, used oil, lab stocks and universal waste all need to be identified and removed before general demolition. Discovering an unknown drum mid-clearance stops work.

Lab pack handles the small-container problem, and unknowns are routine to identify — far more routine than they are to deal with once the site is half demolished.

Set the documentation standard at the start

A closure creates a permanent record that may be looked at years later, in a property transaction or a dispute. Deciding at the outset what evidence you want for each stream, and who holds it, is considerably easier than reconstructing it afterwards.