You pay to haul it out.Then you pay to buy it back.
On most utility contracts there is no bid item for excavation, disposal or backfill. You price it anyway, because it has to come out of the per-foot number. Every ton that leaves and every ton that comes back is margin, and there is no line on the form to recover it.
We model your economics before we recommend a machine.
Everyone prices it. Nobody prices it the same.
Pull any bid tab on a utility job and look at the spread on the pipe installation line. On one recent Miami-Dade water main the same item ran from $30 a foot to $138 a foot against a $60 engineer's estimate. Thirteen contractors, one set of documents, a $108 spread on the same foot of pipe. Nobody there was careless. The difference is how much of that trench each one assumed could stay. That answer is buried in an appendix most bidders never open.
The material moves twice. Out as spoil, back as purchased fill. Neither leg has a pay item.Why this work exists
Out
Excavate, load, truck to a pit, pay to leave it there. Priced by the load, and the load count is set by how deep the trench actually ran, not by what you assumed at bid.
Back
Buy the same volume from a quarry, pay for it delivered, and put it in the hole you just emptied. Same cubic yard, two invoices.
The part that stays
You already carry the cost of moving all of it. Some of what came out was always going to pass. It still has to be separated, sized and documented, but it never has to leave the site, and it never has to be bought twice.
Three tests decide it, and only one of them is fixable
Whether a material can go back in the hole is not a judgement call. It is the order a laboratory runs the tests in, and it is written into the owner's own specification.
Organic content
Over the threshold and it leaves. Nothing blends organics away, and no machine changes that answer.
Passing the No. 200
How much fine material. That is a quantity question, and quantity is a mechanical problem with a mechanical answer.
Plasticity
What kind of fine. Plastic fines are clay, and nothing fixes clay. It is why the spec names clayey material rather than a percentage.
South Florida is the useful case. The fines here are silt and rock dust rather than clay, non-plastic, which puts most of this ground on the fixable side of that middle column. In heavy-clay markets the same problem is chemical and the material leaves. Here it is a separation problem, and separation is something you can do in the trench.
The fines ride with the sand. What comes over the top never had them.
We read the package before you price it
Not the invitation to bid. The geotechnical report, the boring logs, the laboratory sheets, the backfill specification, the standard details, and every addendum. That is where your material position is written, and it is usually the part nobody opens.
Does the contract let you keep what you don’t haul?
One document, two clauses. Whether the bid form carries a pay item for excavation and disposal is not the question. What matters is how that item is measured and who owns the spoil. If you are paid on quantity hauled off and weighed, material that stays never gets measured. If you are paid on plan quantity or excavated volume, every ton you keep is cost you deleted from a line already booked. We read the measurement clause and the material ownership clause first, and we tell you which case you are in before anything else.
What is actually in your trench
Each hole read separately, layer by layer, down to the trench floor, with the laboratory results mapped to the stratum they were pulled from. Where a layer was never tested, we say so. An untested layer is a finding, not a blank.
What the specification permits, layer by layer
Acceptance criteria, particle limits, placement zones, compaction, and the clauses that make you dig deeper for free. Every verdict traced to a printed line in a document you already hold.
The tonnage, and how far you would trust it
Three numbers rather than one. What holds with zero assumptions. What holds with stated assumptions. What is possible only if the engineer agrees to something. You are told which is which before you are told the figure.
The plant is the excavator you already own
No plant, no yard setup, no second crew, no extra operator. The carrier is the machine already standing on your job. We are a full-line ALLU distributor. Screening buckets from skid steer to 120-ton carriers, jaw crusher buckets, dedicated asphalt and concrete buckets, and soil stabilization equipment. Below are the two that do most of the work in South Florida. The rest gets sized to your fleet, and we will tell you plainly when the ground does not justify the machine.
Sizes, sorts and blends in one pass. Compliant material goes back in the trench at a controlled top size instead of onto a truck. Only what the specification actually requires gets imported.
| Series | DC · DL · D · M |
| Carrier class | 2 to 120 t · sized to yours |
| Product top size | set to spec |
| Role | decides what complies |
Two jobs, one machine. Oversize limestone that fails the backfill size limit, six inches on most water main work and three on some, comes down to a passing size instead of leaving on a truck while you buy fill to replace it. And curb, sidewalk, slab and roadway tear-out gets crushed to a sized angular product where it comes out of the ground.
| Type | AC series jaw |
| Carrier class | 4 to 38 t · sized to yours |
| Jaw setting | adjustable to spec |
| Role | makes oversize pass the spec |
Each one stands alone. The screener earns its keep on excavated soil; the crusher earns its keep on concrete and on rock that is over the size limit. Neither needs the other to be worth owning. They do run better together, and here the reason is local. Screening the fines out before crushing raises capacity, because on wet South Florida material those fines are what jams a jaw. And Miami limestone is soft, so crushing it makes its own fines, which means the product has to be screened after crushing to hold the limit it was meant to clear. Where both apply, one carrier and one operator run both.
Not experimental. It runs nationwide.
Reusing trench spoil on site is standard practice on utility and pipeline work across the country. What is not standard is reading one specific job's geotechnical report before quoting it.
Backfill made from the spoil already beside the trench
Same operation, different ground. The excavator that dug the trench screens the spoil straight back into it as backfill. No second machine, no import truck, no haul-off. What comes over the top is oversize the crusher takes; what falls through goes back in the hole.
Look at the left side of the pile. That is the rock a screener separates and a crusher turns into select backfill instead of a disposal bill.
ALLU energy & utility applications →
Backfill made from the spoil already beside the trench.
Who reads it
I work in material processing. What is in the ground on a specific job, what the specification allows back in the trench, and what that is worth against the cost of trucking it out and buying it back.
The economics came before the equipment. A ton has a cost to move whether or not the bid form names it, and that number is knowable from documents the owner already published. The machine is what you reach for once you know it.
Send us the job you're bidding
Not a quote request. Send the bid package, or just the project number and the owner, and you will get a read on your material position before you submit rather than after. If the contract is written so that keeping material costs you more than hauling it, we will say so and there is no second call.
- Public bid documents are enough. If you can download it, we can read it.
- The geotechnical report is the one that matters. Appendix, addendum, wherever it is buried.
- Awarded jobs work too. The next one you bid on that ground is the point.
- No obligation and no equipment pitch until the ground earns it.