A heavily polluted brownfield along Belgium’s A12 corridor. Three tenanted buildings already generating income. And a five-hectare site too well located to ignore. That was the starting point for WDP’s redevelopment of Brownfieldlaan in Willebroek, and the first chapter of that story, full site remediation, is now complete.

WDP has completed the remediation of 220,000 m³ of contaminated soil at its five-hectare Willebroek site, clearing the way for a new multi-storey logistics and business development targeted for 2029.

The site sits directly on the A12, one of the busiest arteries between Antwerp and Brussels, close to the N16 and within reach of a container terminal. For a logistics developer, that combination of visibility and connectivity is rare.

What made the site harder to unlock was underneath it. Decades of prior industrial use had left the soil heavily contaminated, a mix that included large volumes of fly ash. WDP brought in DEME as remediation partner to take on a project too complex for most developers to touch.

The scale only becomes clear in the numbers. Across roughly five hectares, WDP and DEME excavated, sorted and sampled 220,000 m³ of contaminated material, splitting it into homogeneous batches to determine quality and final destination for each.

The project ran under the Brownfield Convenant, which brought public and private stakeholders into the process from the start. That structure kept the many parties aligned and kept redevelopment, not just clean-up, at the centre of every decision.

Remediation did not mean sending everything to landfill. Roughly a third of the material left the site as waste. Another third was recovered as construction material for other projects. The final third stayed on site, to be reused within the future development itself.

After around 18 months of intensive works, the contamination is gone and the site is fully remediated.

With remediation behind it, WDP is now finalising a masterplan for a multi-storey logistics distribution centre combined with a tower for complementary functions, designed to accommodate both large and smaller tenants sharing one high-visibility location.

WDP is deliberately taking the time to get this flagship project right. The environmental permit application is planned for early 2027, with construction start and opening targeted around 2029.

Willebroek shows what brownfield redevelopment can deliver in practice: not chasing new land, but bringing potential back to sites that had lost their original purpose. A contaminated five-hectare plot is becoming, step by step, a new generation of logistics real estate.

The remediation is finished. For WDP Willebroek, the story is only getting started.