Case Study
From the Arctic Circle to the West Coast, KBL Environmental is Transforming Soil Remediation Across Its Facilities
The Inuvik Soil Treatment facility might just be the furthest north soil has ever been tracked.
On a site this far north, dispatching and receiving loads happens from inside a car or building as it’s commonly -40 degrees celsius. The road conditions for trucks are challenging at the best of times, but ultimately, it’s still the same job that gets done as you’d expect at any other facility.
KBL Environmental provides soil remediation and environmental waste management services at complex, remote, and heavily regulated sites, from mine sites to pipeline corridors to facilities north of the Arctic Circle. Soil remediation is central to that work, and KBL is strengthening how it manages that work using SoilFLO, a load tracking and material management system.
Translating Rigorous Environmental Standards Into a Scalable System of Record
Belinda Howes
At the core of KBL’s approach is a simple but critical principle: know exactly what material is on site, where it came from, and what happens to it at every stage. Managing this information across their sites was challenging as some sites managed it with spreadsheets and others with legacy systems like Microsoft Access Database. With this data spread across multiple systems, managing the entirety of their operations put an increased demand on specific individuals in the organization.
KBL integrated SoilFLO into its Richmond Bioremediation facility, Inuvik Soil Treatment Facility, Dawson City Soil Treatment Facility, Cambridge Bay Soil Treatment Facility and Yellowknife Soil Treatment Facility in order to standardize how these facilities are collecting their data. When soil arrives at any of these facilities, it’s recorded in SoilFLO and assigned to a specific windrow and the original waste profile documentation is linked to it. From there, the system tracks the material through post treatment testing, which determines when the soil is eligible for reclassification and repurposing. Once testing is complete and reclassification is confirmed, SoilFLO continues to track it, including copies of the approval documentation, as it moves off site to its final placement.
This end-to-end tracking means everyone across the organization has visibility into a continuous, documented record of every load of material, from intake, through testing, to disposal or reuse. This eliminates the need for tracking using laborious spreadsheets and minimizes the manual process of collecting the information from separate databases.
Tracking Movement Within the Site
Soil remediation isn’t always a linear process. Material classifications can change as testing results come in, and soil often needs to be relocated on site as a result. One of the more valuable capabilities that SoilFLO provides is the ability to track material as it moves internally, not just as it’s imported to and/or exported from each facility. If material is imported into one windrow and is later reclassified and moved to a different windrow, SoilFLO tracks that movement as part of the record. Being able to follow that movement, windrow to windrow, means the full history of a given batch of material is always accounted for, and that history feeds directly into the reports that the team generates.
From Raw Data to Reporting
Belinda Howes
Once material has been tracked through intake, testing, classification, and movement, that information is used to generate custom reports tailored to KBL’s metrics. These reports provide a complete picture of what’s happening on site: what material arrived, how it was tested and classified, where it currently sits, and where it will ultimately end up. Because the reporting pulls directly from the tracked data, the reports reflect the realtime status of the material on site.
With information stored in a single database, managers can easily generate summaries without waiting on the team to compile the data manually. The reporting is automatically built into the day-to-day use of the system.
The Environmental Payoff
Jeff Fleet
From an environmental standpoint, the biggest benefit is the real-time visibility that KBL now has over its operations. They know exactly what material is coming onto each site, confirm that it’s being tested, and verify that it’s classified faster at every stage, minimizing environmental risk and meeting regulatory compliance.
That matters everywhere KBL operates, and especially at facilities like Inuvik and Yellowknife, north of the 60th parallel, where remote conditions can cause delays in summarized reporting. By managing every step of intake, testing, classification, and movement through one system, KBL has leveled up their real-time material classification process. SoilFLO builds a clear audit trail showing each step for every load that comes through Richmond, Inuvik, or Yellowknife.
The Operational Payoff
Jeff Fleet
Operationally, KBL can bring any number of new facilities into the same workflow without adding any additional demand on the team, while all of their reporting is delivered automatically.
Looking Ahead
KBL is bringing more of its receiving facilities onto this same model to standardize its processes and operations across the business. As that expansion continues, KBL gains stronger assurance that material is tested, classified, and handled correctly at every site, backed by a single source of truth that provides real-time visibility to anyone who needs it across the organization.
