THE CHALLENGE: What use can a municipality still get out of its old landfills? They take up a lot of space and remediation to levels that allow new development is expensive. The former municipal waste landfill "Atzenhof" in Furth was an example of this dilemma.

THE APPROACH: The company GWU Solar GmbH showed an innovative approach and built a photovoltaics plant on the site of the former landfill. The plant has a total output of 1 MW. ARCADIS was responsible for the construction of the photovoltaics plant including foundation consulting, the stability proof for the southern slope, the route planning as well as the on-site supervision of construction. The individual modules of the photovoltaics plant (5.0 x 5.0 metres each) were mounted on  prefabricated concrete foundations (1.5 x 2.0 metres each), which were then founded and installed in the recultivation layer. When constructing the plant, special emphasis was put on leaving the surface barrier intact while excavating the construction pits for the individual foundations and while laying the power cables.

THE RESULT: A once useless area now delivers an important and renewable contribution to the city's energy needs.
DE00142