MACCAFERRI SOIL BIOENGINEERING TRAINING MANUAL

Maccaferri, a world-wide organisation of which African Gabions is a licensee, has been involved with
successfully implementing environmental solutions for soil erosion and embankment stabilisation for over 100
years now.

In the last decade, our approach has been to incorporate soft engineering into a hard engineering approach to
come up with a solution, which has the greatest environmental benefit, whilst still satisfying the design needs of
the engineer.

As part of our ongoing objective of educating and training South Africans in this industry, we have recently
developed a Soil Bioengineering Training Manual.

Soil bioengineering is the combined application of engineering practices and ecological principles to design and
build systems of living plant material, frequently with inert material such as rock, wood, geosynthetics,
geocomposites and other manufactured products to repair past and / or control soil erosion and shallow slope
failures. (Sotir, 2001).

This manual has been written for the benefit of engineers, landscape architects, biologists, soil conservationists
and anyone who is concerned and interested in the protection and mitigation of ecosystems. It illustrates the
compatibility of incorporating environmentally sound concepts into the design of engineering solutions.
The manual not only gives a background into soil bioengineering and ecological systems, but for each product
and technique gives:

• The definition and purpose

• Specifications
• Benefits and features
• Applications
• Design considerations
• Installation guidelines

Furthermore, the manual also has standard AutoCAD drawings and introduces our design software.

The soil bioengineering manual is available for distribution on CD Rom. For further information, please email
enviro@africangabions.co.za or contact your nearest African Gabions office, as detailed below.

CROSS SECTION OF A COIR ROLL GREEN TERRAMESH™ VEGETATED EMBANKMENT

DURBAN CAPE TOWN JOHANNESBURG

P O Box 15777, Westmead, 3608
Tel: +27-31-700 8456
Fax: +27-31-700 8469
sales@africangabions.co.za
Web Site: www.africangabions.co.za
P O Box 22150, Fish Hoek, 7974 P O Box 133, Kya Sands, 2163
Tel: +27-21-702 1416 Tel: +27-11-704 0160
Fax: +27-21-702 2977 Fax: +27-11-704 0159
cptsales@africangabions.co.za jhb@africangabions.co.za