“We can’t be a fortune teller, because it’s our customers and their customers who actually drive the demand for change, so we need to have the capability to respond, but the glass bottle is not going anywhere overnight and there are huge efforts underway to make it more sustainable,” says Greencroft Bottling’s Mark Satchwell. The Greencroft team will be at next week’s ProWein to share their plans with existing and potential customers.
This ambitious project has been a few years in the making.Tell us what Greencroft’s new expansion – Greencroft Two – will mean for the company?
It’s huge, some 24,000 square metres, incorporating bespoke tank rooms, plant rooms, specialist offload areas and also 3,000 square metres of new office space for the Greencroft Bottling family.Greencroft Two will afford us two and a half times the production space, compared with the existing operation.We’ll immediately increase from five to six bottling lines for glass, along with two bag-in-box lines and one for cans, but there’s plenty of room to accommodate more.
The new state of the art Greencroft Two AI incorporated packaging facility
The new glass line, to be launched in March, will be our biggest filler to date and incorporates the latest technology and inspection equipment, which means we should increase output to 20,000 bottles per hour, where each of our current lines average between 10,000 and 12,000. We have integrated the latest artificial intelligence technology into our systems, so, for example, AI drives the inspection equipment on the labelling machines.
We will get the new line up and running first and then start to move existing lines, but we cannot afford to lose any production capacity over this period.We’ll be straightening out the lines and making general improvements to our existing set up, as part of a review of our operations to coincide with the move, all of which is aimed at improving productivity and improving quality for our customers.
Looking to the future, Greencroft Two also gives us the space and the infrastructure to experiment and expandto meet the needs of our customers over the next five or 10 years.
Tony Cleary says he wants this to be the most sustainable building of its kind anywhere in the world and that’s no small undertaking.Tell us how you have integrated sustainability into the plans?
Greencroft Bottling’s Mark Satchwell says Greencroft Two has been a long time in the making and fulfils a “promise to the business in terms in giving it a long-term sustainable future”
I can’t speak for Tony, but yes it’s certainly true that the building goes a very long way towards making Greencroft Bottling one of the most sustainable bottling businesses on the planet. The building’s cladding gives it the maximum possible thermal insulation value with no need to use heating.The 3m kWh solar array on our roof, when allied with the 4.5m kWh generated by our onsite wine turbines, combined with an energy storage system, means that we should be completely self-sufficient in terms of electrical energy, which will be vital as energy security becomes a more pressing issue for all of us in the future.
The demands on electrical supply are going to be huge, so to have a facility that we can effectively take off grid is going to be critical for us. It is worth remembering that we are not discarding our original site, which will be repurposed and refurbished to play a key role in our offer for no/low alcohol producers.
I believe that Greencroft Two is sustainable in a number of ways: it will not only allow us to maintain our existing business, but also increase it, while driving productivity and reducing waste, and it is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising those of future generations.
Why is sustainable thinking so important for you and your colleagues at Greencroft Bottling?
Greencroft Two: the inside…
Quite simply, if the business is not sustainable, then there is no business, so it has been front and centre of our thinking for a long time. We adopted water-less rinsing (for bottles) more than 15 years ago and we are constantly reviewing and streamlining our processes.It’s about a culture of sustainability because being carbon neutral is just the beginning.
With that in mind, Greencroft Bottling has traditionally been about glass, though you have multiple formats running along the lines.Much is currently being said about the carbon footprint of glass.Does it have a long term future?
We currently pack MLP (multi-layer PET plastic), bag-in-box, cans and kegs and have also worked with Tetrapak and pouches, but yes, glass is still the leading format.We are constantly looking at packaging weight and we have been filling bottles that each average under 420g for about 15 years now, while we have also been trialing ultra-lightweight and will have more news on that very soon.
We are always focused on our customers and, of course, everybody is looking to reduce glass weight at the moment.There are things happening right now that will make glass much more attractive in sustainability terms, from reducing weight, to improving recycling rates, with the major glass manufactures also looking at a new breed of hybrid and all-electric furnaces that will shift the balance from fossil fuels to green power, which could potentially reduce the carbon footprint of glass by 50%.
Greencroft Bottling is committed to providing the right packaging formats for the wine industry and its customers – including a major investing in canning wines
We can’t be a fortune teller, because it’s our customers, and their customers, who actually drive the demand for change, so we need to have the capability to respond, but the glass bottle is not going anywhere overnight and there are huge efforts underway to make it more sustainable.
It has been quite a journey already, so how will you feel when you see the first bottles go down the new lines within Greencroft Two?
Relieved. I have been responsible for Greencroft Bottling from day one and we have, quite literally, come from small beginnings, because we started with a second hand line, bottling 187ml bottles.Our business has grown through word of mouth and it has always been our reputation that has driven that expansion.
Greencroft Two represents the delivery of a promise to the business in terms in giving it a long-term sustainable future, so that it can continue to grow in the manner it has over the last twenty years.
- Lanchester Group, incorporating Greencroft Bottling, Lanchester Wines and The Wine Fusion invite you to visit its stand at ProWein (Hall 14 Stand G50) to find out more.
- Lanchester Wines is a commercial partner to The Buyer. You can find out more about what it does here.
