The eco economy

Adnams is a beer that Suffolk folk have always said didn't travel too well beyond the seaside town of Southwold where it's brewed – probably because they wanted to keep the amber nectar to themselves. But the 120-year old brewery's managing director Andy Wood wasn't fooled and, a while ago, indulged in some fortuitous planning. "We acquired this piece of land just outside Southwold – 84 acres of disused gravel workings – in the knowledge that at some point, if we achieved our growth plan, we would have to move out of town because 50 heavy vehicle movements a day were shaking this wonderful Georgian seaside town to its foundations," he says. As the 21st century broke, a decision by Adnams to develop its brand provoked a growth spurt that brought into focus the need for a move. At around the same time, it had codified a set of organisational values – one of them spelled out a concern for the natural and built environment. "We live on the edge of the world really; closer to Holland than to London and as the North Sea surges, we feel the effects of the environment," Wood explains. "A number of our pubs flood and it's difficult to get out of Southwold." Woods believes that the thinking at Adnams' regional neighbour Norwich Union – which is in the process of adopting its new global moniker Aviva – goes against all current consumer trends. The mood of the moment is about provenance and 'understanding local', he believes. "That's why we wanted to keep our manufacturing in the town." So, Adnams set about building a bold new distribution centre on its gravel pit, and next, behind the cottage walls of seaside Southwold, craned and crammed a new brewery into place. "We have a 100-year old Victorian façade and, behind it, the pots, pans and pipes of a totally new brewery, probably the first new brewery in the UK since the 1980s," Wood boasts. "We had to take the roof off, we had to close the streets in Southwold, we had to crane it in and work with Huppmann [the German brewhouse manufacturer] to create something that could fit into a very tight space." The result is one of the most energy and water efficient breweries in Europe (Adnams benchmarks it against 15 others to prove it). "How many pints of water to make a pint of beer?" Wood asks. "It's eight on average and some of the worst offenders are using 15. We're using 3.1 pints at the moment and we'll get that below three. Water usage is a big environmental catastrophe waiting to happen and we've moved on in that." Back at the gravel pit, in 2004/5 Adnams challenged the architects to respond to its determination to build a new out-of-town distribution centre that was in keeping with the natural environment. The overarching plan was for something very different: first- class operational facilities, something that staff could be proud of, something that would enhance Adnams' reputation, and something that was kind to the environment. It came in the shape of glue laminated beams supporting a grass-covered roof, a rainwater capture system, and solar panels, among a raft of environmentally friendly features. Thermal stability was achieved by sinking the build 7m down and making the walls from lime hemp blocks – a technology used in France in the 18th/19th century and reinvented to use on a commercial basis after a £100,000 investment with the University of Bath to stress test the material which had never been used on this scale before. It was worth the bother. "It has such great thermal properties," Wood enthuses. "The optimal temperature to store beer is 13¡C. When we commissioned this building and put the roof on in June 2006, we were in the middle of a very hot spell. The building was very warm so our staff came in late at night and opened all the doors in the building – effectively opening the sides of the building up. This cooled it down to 13¡C and we've managed to maintain that ambient temperature without any artificial heating or cooling from that day to today. What we're dealing with here is a big Thermos flask keeping things at the right temperature and cutting our energy bills because we're not running chilling or heating equipment and putting hydrocarbons into the atmosphere." A 50% cut in gas and electricity bills isn't the only benefit for the brewery. "We've seen a tremendous drop in staff absenteeism since moving to the building and a drop in health and safety incidents as well," Wood says. "Remember that the brewing industry is still quite a big heavy industry with individual people moving quite heavy items. Nine gallons of Adnams beer weighs 50 kilos: if you dropped that on your foot, you'd know all about it." Going forward, Adnams is planning to create what Wood calls an industrial ecology. The firm supports something like 40 local farms and has a direct relationship with 12 in Suffolk and Norfolk. Under the plan, when it reaches fruition, spent grain, water and hops will be taken from the Southwold brewery to the new distribution centre and put through a process called anaerobic digestion during which 5,000 tons of food waste will generate at least 15 to 20% of the organisation's energy needs and produce "a substance that is a bit like Baby Bio on steroids" that goes back to the local farms as an organic fertiliser. But the biggest impact of all, Wood says, is on staff. "They have become enormously proud of the facility. Staff morale and motivation has risen tremendously and we measure this through staff opinion surveys." Nearly 200 miles and a world away from the art of brewing in Suffolk, the outskirts of the one-time steel city of Sheffield is home to a very different industrial new-build. A bit like Adnams' disused gravel pit, it's built on the site of an old open cast mine, and also puts people-friendly values among its most important attributes. The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), designed by Bond Bryan Architects for the University of Sheffield and its partners Boeing and Rolls-Royce, is known as 'the factory of the future' (below left). It creates, say its advocates, "a new benchmark in manufacturing facilities that is already having an influence in industry internationally". Many environmental attributes like natural ventilation and 98% natural light helped earn the £9 million building a unique 'excellent' Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) rating. They make it, according to the university's projects director John Baragwanath, "a very special place to work". With its 'social heart space' – through which the 100 or so people working there all travel, sit and take lunch – Baragwanath says more networking goes on in the 4,500 sq m building than did in its 1,200 sq m predecessor. The university's department of psychology even helped with the design of what Bond Bryan's Geoff Halliwell describes as "quite an intellectual route around colours and journeys" to suit the best working environments for an office and a research facility. There's also a fitness gym and quite a lot of people are motivated to cycle out from the city of Sheffield to the facility that is officially just across the border in Rotherham, he says. Two 56m-high wind turbines (the planners rejected a single 85m version because of the site's proximity to Sheffield airport) and ground source heat pumps penetrating 100m into the soil providing year-long, free energy and a rainwater harvesting system help to make this Europe's most efficient and sustainable manufacturing site. Designed at the back end of 2005 and finally delivered a year ago, it's "a model for industry that can show how to compete in a world of rising energy costs," says Baragwanat, and puts paid to the belief that low-carbon energy and sustainability cannot sit comfortably in commercial industrial environments. To which Halliwell adds the reassurance that facilities such as this can be delivered to a reasonable budget "not massively higher than for a conventional building". He may be right. In Telford, yet another very different manufacturing sector that's not a natural bedfellow of the environment has been working with a similar budget to win a remarkable 'very good' BREEAM rating on a new plant to produce industrial mortar. Yes, that's mortar as in cement. Weber, the construction products division of Saint-Gobain, is an €8bn – €10bn turnover business with more than 200 factories. It needed another one. The company's Northern Ireland factory was working 24 hours a day and struggling to keep up with demand. "We had a severe shortage of capacity," says Weber's Eamon McDonnell. The trend towards using factory-engineered products to save time on site had led to the market growing very quickly and too many products were being imported. In particular, strong growth in the use of coloured render to finish new and refurbished buildings played to the primary advantages of Weber's system – the use of mineral render technology applying protection and insulation on the outside of buildings. A new factory was required to supply the UK and Ireland. McDonnell describes the facility where he is managing director as being "like a bakery ingredients factory; like a cake mix, you add water and it goes off". A desire to be located in an area that would allow the plant to conveniently service the West Midlands and the north, and an ability to draw on raw materials without them having to be transported too far, too expensively, led to the choice of Telford. The new Weber factory was designed from scratch with local input in the design and an equally important contribution from the company's Paris head office, drawing on its experience of building four or five factories every year. Nevertheless, meeting UK regulations that McDonnell says are stricter than they would be on the continent, meant it took almost 15 months to finalise the design – although building the plant itself, from breaking ground to completion, only took a record eight. High priority Like Adnams, Weber and its parent company put safety very high on the agenda, designing out any risk. "The way you do that is through segregation," says McDonnell. "There are two main risks in our plant; the first is dust, the second is to do with people, plant and process. We've designed it with minimal interaction between people and anything that moves, so the risk of an accident is minimised. You automate everything and you also lay out the plant in such a way as the traffic moves one way around the site. Take all risk out and then you can optimise efficiency." Typically, the plant is 30% more efficient than Weber's existing plants. Material wastage down to leaks and spills, usually around 2.5% of material, has been eliminated for the first time by recycling so that "not one gramme of powder leaves the plant". A process that has bulk raw materials like cement, silica sands and calcium carbonate pumped from tankers to the top of the plant's 37m-high tower and stored in silos before being gravity fed down to various way-hoppers and blended prior to arriving at a mixing and bagging plant at the bottom, takes place in an environment where there is a full recovery of all particulates. For employees, the air in the plant is completely free of dust. The plant has been running since the beginning of November, albeit for only 35% of the time because Weber is still transferring production and looking at bringing other products there. And even though the market has turned down and things are not building up as quickly as planned, McDonnell is looking at a payback period of less than five years, and expects to achieve it. "We feel extremely confident," he says. "One of the advantages of investing in a new building from scratch is that it gives you a huge competitive advantage."