As CCE European president Hubert Patricot explained: “This is the biggest plant in Europe and the best, producing over a million cans of product every day. The company is proud of its massive strides in achieving sustainability. We want to be held accountable for this progress, for our commitments for 2020.
“We’ve pledged to reduce overall carbon emissions and to do this we need to measure how much carbon we produce and where. We know, for instance, that cooling our product is responsible for the 70% of energy use and we’ve already cut our use of water dramatically. We’re saving transport miles by sharing loads with our customers and retailers and better journey planning.
“We’ve reduced our packaging weight. The latest can wall is the same width as a human hair, saving 15,000 tonnes of aluminium. We’re carrying out more recycling with a variety of partners; we currently have 28 recycling zones and plan to expand this to 52.”
Newsweek recently voted CCE as No 1 when it comes to environmental performance.
The site at Wakefield opened in 1989 as part of an original investment of £90m. Over the past 20 years, a further investment of £150m means the factory now produces more than a million cans of product every day. The new production line will increase the site’s capacity from over 66 cans per second to over 100 cans per second.
The site’s new preform area was opened by local MP, the Rt Hon Ed Balls. The new area is the result of a £6m investment that will allow the factory to produce its own preforms, which are then blown into PET bottles, helping to cut production costs and carbon emissions by reducing delivery miles by 135,000 every year.
Stephen Moorhouse, Coca-Cola Enterprises vice president & general manager for European Supply Chain, said: “We’re immensely proud of the achievements at our site in Wakefield. Wakefield is our largest factory in Great Britain but is the most energy efficient in terms of energy used for every 1,000 litres of soft drinks it makes, and is the first to house its own preform area. This will help remove transportation from the UK’s roads, reducing carbon emissions, and enable the site to work even more efficiently.”
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