or a company with a portfolio of marketing campaigns that are the envy of the industry, Albert Bartlett has been surprisingly reticent to shout about its environmental ambitions. Targets around water, waste and carbon have remained a closely guarded secret and, while other companies have set Hollywood-style sustainability goals, the potato grower and packer has gone about its business quietly - and efficiently.
Now it has opened the doors of its Airdrie factory to FPJ, along with access to some of the progress it’s making towards its environmental goals. Emissions, for instance, have been cut from 25kg of CO2 per tonne of packed potatoes in 2008 to 20kg in 2011. This year’s target is 19.8kg, and by 2020 emissions should be as low as 18.5kg CO2 per tonne. Waste has also been cut, with just 139 tonnes a year being sent to landfill - down from 220 tonnes at the end of 2009. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been worth it.
“We’re in a very comfortable place given the investment we’ve made in the past 10 years,” says director of operations Colin Campbell. Comfortable, but not complacent. “Packaging is still a big one for us. We can be smarter on that,” he admits. Plans to install a wind turbine at the Airdrie site have also hit snags and there are the constant negotiations with customers - Sainsbury’s has its 20 by 20 sustainability plan and its suppliers have to buy in or ship out.
But now the company feels it’s time to start talking, as well as doing - something the Scottish government could well heed having not met its greenhouse gas emissions target for 2010. Is that the reason for Bartlett’s lack of public targets - fear of failure?
“At the moment it’s not a top consumer-facing message,” says development and innovation director Gillian Kynoch. “We have quite a bit of insight into how interested shoppers are in this agenda - the answer is ‘not very’. Much of the building of our brand is building a trust that we are working in the right direction.”
Campbell and Kynoch have invited me for a tour of the Airdrie site to see where they have come from and where they are going. The facility, one of three with the others being in Jersey and Lincolnshire, was designed and built “with the environment in mind”. That was in 2003, mind - technology has changed and all the learnings from this site have been ploughed into the £15m ‘state-of-the-art 2009’ site in Jersey. As Campbell admits, keeping pace with change can cause headaches.
“It’s knowing when to jump on to new technology. You have to have a financial payback, and that can be difficult sometimes.” He singles out a project to ‘free cool’ the IT room, an alternative to air conditioning that was more expensive on paper but will be cheaper to run.
There are other initiatives that didn’t work out, and Campbell is not afraid to admit it. Carbon labelling, for instance. “We looked at that about three years ago, thinking that if Walkers can do it then why can’t we? All along we knew it had to be meaningful.”
It wasn’t: “There were no clear guidelines that everyone could use - you can put anything on pack if you disclose the method. Do you fudge the figures to make you look good [or] to gain a competitive edge?”
That isn’t the nature of the company. Indeed, one of Campbell’s pet hates is unfathomable targets, not least ‘zero waste’. Instead, the company has a ‘zero waste to landfill’ target, which won’t be easy to meet with 139 tonnes still without a home.
“It’s very difficult to send nothing to landfill,” he explains. “There are products without revenue and they have to be sent to landfill.” He says it also depends on the definition of waste: Albert Bartlett would have waste to landfill figures of under one per cent if they included the rejects that are sold for cattle feed - but they don’t.
Currently, the company produces 500,000 tonnes of finished product a year and less than five tonnes a month of waste is sent to landfill.
Good progress. In fact, Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) visited the site to help cut waste further, but left wanting to use the company as an example of best practice as the country gears up for a new series of waste regulations next year which will eventually see some materials banned from landfill.
It was an innovative scanning system that caught the eye of the ZWS consultants. Each pair of product lines have a bin tagged with a unique barcode. At the end of production runs, the bins are scanned and weighed to identify exactly how much each line has created. Problems with staff, equipment or packaging (ripped bags, for instance or misprints on labels) stand out and are quickly rectified. Results are published and staff compete to ensure they are not bottom of the table.
“The system puts a value on waste,” explains Russell White, site services manager. “We’d never really looked at what we were wasting and what it was costing. This system cost us £7,000 and we know it’s saving us £200,000 a year.”
That’s a return on investment any company would welcome. Staff are also engaged - and they have to be, says White. For a couple of years the company struggled in its bid to cut waste to landfill to below 200 tonnes, but last year it achieved 139 tonnes - a 36 per cent drop - thanks to a new scheme to encourage staff to recycle their old cans and packaging waste from the canteen.
But here’s another advantage bonus from using the bin scanners: engagement with customers. “The supermarkets are always pushing for us to drive down the thickness of the film on bags,” says White. “But the scan system can be used in negotiations: they can see that 35mg bags can result in a lot more waste than the 55mg ones.”
Relationships with customers are critical, and a lot can rest on shared aims around sustainability. Sainsbury’s, a big customer, has its ambitious 20 by 20 sustainability plan, which includes targets for suppliers to cut emissions and meet other environmental and social goals. Kynoch says the direction of travel of suppliers should be closely aligned with those for Sainsbury’s. The 20 by 20 plan, for instance, provides a medium-term ethical compass which helps “hugely” - and is a far better situation than plans that change as frequently as fashions.
A lot of the work at the moment is focused on growing potatoes. Sainsbury’s wants to double the amount of British food it sells by 2020, and this will mean extending the season for varieties like Vivaldi - which Bartlett sells exclusively to the supermarket.
Working with farmers will help improve quality, and in the longer-term storage too, in a bid to cut the numbers of rejects. Many food businesses have been looking closely at the inherent value in their food waste of late - no longer is it something they write a cheque for and it’s taken away.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure - and Campbell has been approached by plenty of waste contractors looking to take away the rejects to feed their anaerobic digestion (AD) plants. Spuds provide the perfect, consistent feed for the bacteria in the digestors to create plenty of energy, and a nice profit for the waste company and its investors. However, they have left Airdrie disappointed: 100 per cent of the potato crop is used, be it for retail, processing or cattle feed.
“Financially, AD doesn’t work for us,” Campbell admits. “They want to charge me to take it away […] they said it wasn’t in their business plan to pay for [food waste].
“I am getting £17 on average [per tonne for selling the rejects as cattle feed] and it’s not in my business plan to give it away.”
Not giving much away has been the company’s motto when it comes to sustainability in the past, but that is changing. -
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