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Cotswold salad factory is a green building |
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11 Sep 2012, 9:00 PM
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A new salad processing and packaging plant at Middle Littleton is housed in a green building. The curved roof is vegetated with a mixture of grasses and indigenous wild flowers.
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A new salad processing and packaging plant at Middle Littleton is housed in a green building. The curved roof is vegetated with a mixture of grasses and indigenous wild flowers. The roof maximises the thermal efficiency of the building whilst providing a new wildlife habitat which blends almost seamlessly into the contours of the surrounding Cotswold Hills.
The Hempcrete walls, made from renewable and sustainable hemp and lime have very low embodied carbon whilst also achieving excellent thermal control. For the building’s facade, Lime Technology’s Hemclad® likewise provides high thermal inertia, low U-values and negative embodied carbon. To date, it is the largest factory anywhere in the UK to be built using this newly developed cassette walling system.
As well as offering exceptional environmental performance, the off-site manufactured product can be erected quickly and simply on site. The 3,500m2 application onto the building’s steel frame took approximately half the time expected – only 15 to 20 minutes for each individual panel – helping the project to be delivered within a short timeframe to exceed the client’s expectations.
The system features bespoke timber cassettes which are manufactured in a controlled factory environment. They are filled with a bio-composite insulating material made from a lime based binder and hemp shiv, plus a hemp and flax fibre insulation to create a panel with low U-value. The panels are then delivered to site and lifted into place.
Thermal Solar panels will be used to heat water and a photovoltaic array to produce electricity whilst a geothermal heat pump system will assist temperature continuity.
Rainwater will be harvested and used in all amenity areas. There is also a sustainable storm water management system on site that controls excess rainwater and the ponds created provide a home for nesting mallards, grass snakes, frogs, newts, toads, bulrushes and reeds. In preparing for this project the company has more than doubled their capacity to recycle water bringing the process waste water from the new facility back to high potable standards. This has been achieved by incorporating an advanced low energy filtration system, the first in the UK, reducing power inputs by 75%. The plant produces clean water by biodigestion and reverse osmosis, providing 1200m3 of pure water a day; presently half of the factory requirements.
Kanes, who own the plant, say that they source most of the salad they process locally from growers in the Vale of Evesham, famed for its garden produce.
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