The first and most effective step towards not increasing our impact on global warming is to reduce what we send to landfill. Reduction of waste has a huge effect, especially in an industrial operation like ours.
WineWorks has removed most of its rubbish bins – risky, you might think, but if the team are focussed on what we are trying to do, works really well, and this has been our single biggest improvement. Our number of 16m3 skips dumped has reduced from 65 to 18 over the last few years:
Secondly, electricity is our single biggest contributor to our carbon footprint. We’ve been making inroads by using automatic switching devices to turn off things that are not used eg.
- lights in a warehouse when nothing is moving,
- air compressors when no machines are running, into the kWh per case, and
- using variable speed drives that run machines as fast as they need to go rather than full speed all the time.
So we are now measuring things by how much power we are using per case of wine we bottle:
We’ve still got plenty of changes to go – we’re looking at changing our gas usage from imported CO2 to Nitrogen that we make on site, heat recovery can be wasteful, and hot water production has potential to drive additional savings; we are confident we will be able to see another 10% in the next year or so.
Then we start work on the big one, converting all electricity usage to fully renewable, replacing as much diesel as we can while we do that.