Factory Fresh

Peter Malaise gets excited about the new Ecover factory. It’s no concrete shoe box, but a striking green building that also makes economic sense - and a social contribution.

Watch this space - we’re building a new factory.

The one we’ve already got, at Malle, not far from Antwerp, was a world first as an ecological factory when it opened in 1992. Umpteen thousand visitors have swarmed through its cathedral-like interior every year, while tens of thousands of tonnes of ecological cleaning products have come out of its gates. It’s a vast building, and we were confident it would last us for years - but we hadn’t reckoned with the explosion in demand for our products, triggered by the rise in global concern over environmental degradation and health issues around the turn of the millennium.

Our administration grew; marketing needed more staff; the lab had no room to expand - and the last straw came when the production department more or less pushed everybody out into portacabins. At that point we made up our minds: we needed to extend our production facilities. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do so on the spot, because we were already occupying the maximum building space we were allowed.

Finding anywhere that met our spec for a new site was a pretty harrowing process. We needed somewhere big enough, with room for expansion. It had to be well located for our markets and for the availability of labour. It had to be accessible by water. And we needed reasonable certainty, before we committed ourselves, that all the necessary permissions for the delivery, handling and storage of chemicals would be forthcoming. But we finally got everything we were looking for, in a newly created industrial estate at Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France.

What we’re building there is a supplementary facility - we’re not moving production out of Belgium. But, notwithstanding the distance between the two, the French factory will help us make significant cuts in transport while reaching markets that stretch from Portugal and Spain to the Balkans and all points in between. We’re much closer to the UK market as well - we’ll have direct access to Boulogne harbour.

The real challenge for companies operating on sustainability principles is to balance ecological necessity and economic opportunity. We’re going big on water saving at Boulogne, for instance, with built-in rainwater harvesting to supply the toilets and washrooms, and minimal use of water for maintenance purposes - adopting such alternatives as a system of cleaning ducts and pipes with a ‘pig’ driven by pressurised air. On the power front, meanwhile, we’re keeping it simple to start with, just buying green electricity, but with various options incorporated in the structure of the building to add solar panels and other onsite renewable generation.

The production and technical equipment we’re installing will duplicate what we have at Malle, but on a bigger scale and in a more sophisticated form. Production here will be equally flexible, although it’s intended to deal mainly with the kind of products, like our Dishwash, that we manufacture in large quantities. And we’ll be enforcing strict production protocols, in line with our intention of getting ISO 14001 certification for our environmental management.

Our new building, measuring 10,000 square metres expandable to 15,000, will feature a green roof - as we have at Malle - held up by spectacularly huge laminated wooden beams. The external façade will look great too, with a render incorporating naturally coloured quartz which responds to the dynamics of changing light throughout the day. In fact, one striking thing about the whole industrial estate is the care that is being taken over the visual and natural environment. Strict rules govern the size and colour of buildings, and local tree and plant varieties have been used in the landscaping. It’s one of the first estates in Europe with such state-of-the-art sustainability regulations, its own water treatment plant, and indeed its own ISO 14001 certificate.

This region in the north of France suffers from dramatically high unemployment. That’s a problem that Ecover can’t hope to solve, but we can at least soften it by hiring almost everyone we need locally and training them up. So the social element, the ‘third leg’ of sustainability, is part of the equation too.

Peter Malaise is concept manager at Ecover.

9 November 2006

Peter Malaise