Alsip Coca-Cola Plant

The Alsip Coca-Cola property contains 41 acres of development and open space at the southwest corner of Laramie Avenue and 122nd Street in Alsip, Illinois. The site was originally developed as a bottling plant in 1969 and has undergone several additions. In 2017, when Eriksson Engineering Associates, Ltd. (EEA) first started working on this property, it consisted of a 200,000-square-foot bottling plant and a 210,000-square-foot distribution center. Over the last six years, EEA has worked on a number of different projects throughout the site.

Our firm was originally contracted by the owner to provide design and permitting services for a truck parking expansion in the truck court south of the distribution center. This was a relatively straight-forward project complicated by the MWRD’s 2014 Watershed Management Ordinance. However, EEA was able to successfully work with the MWRD to defer any new stormwater management improvements until a future, larger project was undertaken.

In 2018, EEA was tasked with analyzing two alternate expansion projects and to make recommendations regarding the potential impacts and costs of each. Based on our findings, the owner ultimately moved forward with the construction of a 10-story, 66,000-square-foot automatic storage and retrieval system building (AS/RS) connecting the bottling plant with the distribution facility. To facilitate the construction of this building, an infrastructure project first needed to be implemented. Infrastructure improvements included a new detention system, relocation of several utilities, construction of a new fire main, and expansion of employee parking lots and truck areas.

While the AS/RS was under construction in 2020, a new project was initiated to demolish and replace the office portion of the distribution center. EEA facilitated an expedited permit process for this 15,000-square-foot office addition, which ultimately provided the owner with time and cost savings.

In 2023, EEA designed a new sanitary sewer service for the bottling plant in order to separate its wastewater from its process water. In the existing condition, 9,000 GPD of wastewater was being added to 400,000 GPD of process water and routed under the floor of the bottling plant. The new service will route the wastewater out of the plant to rejoin the process water downstream.