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Funeral supplies business saves with biomass boiler |
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17 Apr 2015, 6:27 PM
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A Wirral based funeral supplies business expects to make significant carbon and financial savings after investing in renewable energy technology.
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A basketwork willow coffin - one of Halliday's green funeral items.
Halliday Funeral Supplies has installed a £220,000 199kW HDG biomass boiler – one of the leading models available on the market - as well as a £30,000 waste processing unit that takes waste and shreds it into a size that can go into the boiler which, in turn, provides the business with its hot water and heat.
A 5,000-litre insulated heat storage tank further enhances the system’s efficiency when supplying large demands for heating and hot water during the coldest months of the year.
The biomass boiler system qualifies for the Government’s non-domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme – which pays system owners to generate heating and hot water from renewable sources such as biomass wood chip fuel.
The company was established in 1979 and is a family run business. This year they expect to manufacture around 26,000 coffins – in its busiest months this can amount to 600 coffins a week – to be distributed to funeral directors across the country.
Richard Halliday said: “The introduction of the biomass boiler has transformed our business. Our company produces 378 tons of waste annually made up of 306 tons of wood and general waste and a further 72 tons of sawdust. Until the introduction of the biomass boiler, the 306 tons were sent to landfill, but in its first year in operation, some 254 tons were re-routed to biomass, while the 72 tons of sawdust waste is recycled. The benefits of introducing the biomass technology to our business are multiple. For example, our annual waste bill used to be £24,000 a year – this has now been slashed to less than £4,000 a year.
“In addition, our gas consumption, which was running at £10,000 a year, has been cut to less than £5,000. The commercial RHI will provide further substantial payback over a 20-year period.”
Halliday added: “The combination of environmental and financial savings alone justify our substantial investment in renewable energy technology. We are keen to invest in further forms of renewables – as long as there is both an environmental and business case for doing so. We are proud of our achievements as a business during the past 36 years and an increasingly important part of our success story is our commitment to integrating the best possible environmental practices into the way we work.”
During the past two years, the business has increased staff numbers at its 24,500 sq. ft. site on the North Cheshire Trading Estate from 24 to 32, and taken on its first apprentice.
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