Environmental Policy
The Blakeman team take their responsibility to reduce their carbon footprint and their impact on the environment very seriously. Having an extensive environmental policy and consistently investing in reducing their carbon footprint, means that Blakemans are always striving for net zero carbon emissions and delivering tangible cost savings.
Steve Collinge, Operations director for James T Blakeman & Co ltd said:
“At Blakemans, we do not have a static approach to reducing our environmental impact. We are constantly evolving in a bid to over-achieve upon the regulations and guidelines that we are given and that we have set out in our ESOS (energy saving opportunity scheme) and SECR (streamlined energy and carbon reporting) schemes. It is a top priority for us as a business.”
Recently they have switched all of the refrigeration systems throughout the production process to Azanefreezer units, completed an upgrade to all of the lighting throughout the manufacturing plant to LED and even ensured that all of their food waste is used to create renewable energy by a 3rd party, using an anaerobic digester.
Another recently completed project was the instillation of two new inline ovens in their purpose built cooking plant. One replaced an older model with the other being an additional unit. These instillations have seen an increase in production volumes by 50% whilst simultaneously reducing energy consumption per kg produced.
Carrying on from this, they have started to replace their old temperature controlled delivery trailers for newer, more efficient units. They even considered the environment when completing the designs for the trailers, changing out the dark blue colours of Blakemans tradition for designs which are predominantly white. These changes should mean that the refrigerated units will not need to work as hard to combat heat absorption on sunny days, saving on fuel consumption.
As one project comes to fruition there are always others waiting in the pipelines. Their next steps are already well under way, including the installation of solar panels at the production facility and changing over their systems for the temperature control of production areas to more efficient ammonia systems.
