When demolition time arrives in the Melbourne CBD there are few individuals, families and companies around with the skills and experience of Tim Skidmore, the Skidmore family and their team at City Circle. The Skidmores have been a leader in the Australian demolition, remediation, excavation and recycling fields since 1981. Today, Tim Skidmore is the Operations Manager of the family owned and operated business specialising in commercial demolition in the Melbourne CBD. Tim has 30 years (all of his working life) of experience behind him in the demolition game, but demolition is far from the only service they provide. The City Circle team also run highly successful demolition recycling yards in Brooklyn, Dandenong and Melton that are critical to their business’ success.
If you’re not familiar with City Circle’s services, they offer all forms of demolition being specialists in large-scale commercial demolition, but still happy to do domestic and strip-out work when clients need it. The team are happy to work anywhere in Victoria, as well as southern NSW and even Tasmania. The three recycling yards produce more than 1 million tonnes of crushed concrete per year. Tim and the team have invested in static and mobile crushing plants along with specialist ancillary equipment to process material at its source or at the company’s recycling centre. Their concrete is crushed and processed into a range of VicRoads specification road base, pavement and fill products. The rock is processed into crushed rock aggregates and the masonry and brick rubble is used as paving base. Ferrous and non-ferrous metals are recycled for scrap. City Circle is one of the leaders in this field in Victoria and has considerable capacity to process and supply a comprehensive range of high quality recycled concrete, rock, brick rubble and timber products to the Victorian construction industry.
ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY FROM THE GET-GO
From the early days, City Circle understood that at its core, demolition business activities must involve an inherent consideration for the environment. Therefore, it made sense to take a proactive approach by establishing an integrated recycling business to reduce waste significantly. The way of the future was clearly to transform waste into valuable resources to create more sustainable cities.
NEW RELATIONSHIPS BUILT ON TRUST
City Circle has recently purchased two new Volvo machines from CJD Equipment and has been extremely happy with the way things have started off so far. When I asked Tim about the relationship with CJD Equipment and Volvo, he replied “Our equipment is critical to everything we do, and the service we have received from CJD Equipment has been really warm and friendly. Brian (Regional Sales Manager) has been very helpful and welcoming, and Darren (State Sales Manager) has been terrific with his support. We use small machinery and big machinery alike and tend to avoid manual labour.
“Specialist machinery such as the new EC480EHR is what sets our business apart from the others. Our operators have been impressed with the smooth hydraulics and power of the new Volvo machine. In particular, the long reach arm has enabled some great opportunities bringing down a 6-storey building on the existing site and the wider set tracks and additional counterweights used the machine’s substantial power.
“The Volvo EC480EHR is completing a job at 601 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, which was a 5-storey office block with 2-storey basement total demolition. Its next project is a 3-storey office in 20 Queens Road, Melbourne, where the machine’s ground speed stability and power will feature strongly yet again. We are also working on Murrumbeena Train Station, Rod Laver Arena, CSIRO Highett, Waterfront City Docklands and many other projects. Our full range of services includes project consultancy, full demolition-commercial, industrial and domestic demolition. Partial demolition, demolition within hazardous environments (petrochemical facilities), asbestos removal project management and our recycling facilities all require us to be at the top of our game, with only the best-specialised equipment available.”
WHY THE CHANGE TO VOLVO?
I couldn’t help but be just a little intrigued about why a company with so much experience in the industry and with other brands of machinery would make a substantial change within their business, so I asked Tim the million dollar question, and Tim was pretty straight to the point, ”Volvo machinery is specialised equipment. We purchased the EC480EHR because it’s the most advanced high-reach demolition machine on the market today and we are looking forward to building a relationship with CJD Equipment who also shares the same principles that mean a lot to us here at City Circle. Our relationship with CJD Equipment is relatively new as we recently have two Volvo machines in our fleet from CJD Equipment. They offer the complete package in construction equipment including sales, servicing of new machines and 24-hour backup support for issues that may arise.
All of these items were factored into our decision to buy a Volvo from CJD Equipment– it is trust in the people we deal with and the machinery we operate that will keep us coming back.