A £600,000 scheme to clean up a historic Warrington waterway is due to start in the |New Year.
Preparatory site works have already started on the restoration of the Woolston New Cut canal, which has lain abandoned and heavily contaminated since the 1950s.
Funding is being provided by the North West Development Agency’s “Revive” initiative and from the Waste Resources Action Programme (WRAP).
A 275m section of the canal will be treated, west of New Cut Lane, Woolston and will involve the use of significant amounts of recycled materials, including green compost.
Partners in the project include Warrington Borough Council, Peel Holdings, the two Liverpool universities, Envirolink North West and WRAP.
Surveys carried out since the early 1990s have identified significant contamination of the canal sediment, with a range of metals including lead, cadmium, zinc, copper and chromium, plus arsenic and hydrocarbons.
Attempts to treat these, either by removal or in situ treatments have not been possible for technical reasons, but mainly due to the high cost.
Now, however, research carried out in partnership with the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool John Moores University has identified the potential for the in situ treatment of the contamination at low cost and in an environmentally friendly manner.
This will involve moving the sediment around within the canal and subsequent phytoremediation technology.
Together with improvements to parts of the adjacent glue factory site, the borough council is progressing the creation of an urban ecology park that will include the reclamation of one section of the canal.
