The project involved construction of a large warehouse at the UQ Gatton Campus to provide storage capacity of 33,000 lineal meters of compactus shelving for Library material which was housed at Ipswich, Milton and St Lucia sites. The key challenge of the project was to design a floor slab to the required heavy load capacity and very tight movement criteria required for the automated compactus units. Robert Bird Group’s innovative approach was to modify the existing extremely reactive soil conditions and to control the moisture variation through partial soil replacements together with a protecting cut-of wall to achieve a non-spanning economical slab that could resist high loads with minimal defection.