Vitacress: a case of when washing greens led to more than just greenwash

Back in the early 2000s, Europe’s largest salad grower, Vitacress, was facing an image problem. Its farm near Andover in Hampshire was attracting bad publicity. In 2002, it had its planning permission for more docking bays at its salad pack house overturned amid complaints that it was polluting the chalk stream that ran through its St Mary Bourne Farm. The story even made it into the national press.

Vitacress knew only too well it had a problem with the Bourne Rivulet; it had been funding research for some years to try and identify the cause of a long-standing invertebrate population imbalance in the stream. Freshwater shrimps, once abundant, were no longer present.

Steve Rothwell, production and technical director at Vitacress, remembers well the frustration the company felt about the bad press it was getting. “That sort of publicity annoyed us,” he confesses, but the company knew it would do no good to complain; instead it had to try to turn the situation around and publicise the good work it was doing.

In 2006, it made a breakthrough on the cause of the disappearing shrimps: mustard oils, released from cut watercress, were entering the rivulet and driving away sensitive invertebrate species.

Like all UK salad growers that pre-packed ‘ready to eat’ varieties, Vitacress was having to wash to sanitise its salads and was using chlorine, a method which requires far less use of water in the washing process, but creates its own problems.
“The process costs money and we had to return the water to the river, which meant we had to de-chlorinate it,” explains Rothwell.

Amid all the controversy, the company engineered an environmentally sustainable solution to its problem. “After extensive trials and negotiations, in 2007 we persuaded our customers to approve a chemical free wash process. The Vitacress prepared salads were to be washed in pure spring water,” says Rothwell.

Vitacress now simply ‘borrows’ water from the boreholes that are pumped to irrigate its watercress beds and passes the water in through stainless steel wash lines in which the salad leaves are washed. The wash water is then passed back to watercress beds to grow the crop, before being returned to Bourne Rivulet. “The water still picks up traces of the mustard oils when we wash watercress, but all of this wash water – some 2,500 cubic metres per day – is now passed through watercress beds, where the mustard oils are degraded,” says Rothwell.

Vitacress’ unique pure spring water solution had solved its conservation issues, effectively bringing back the shrimps (samples show there are now double the number considered to be acceptable), but it had also achieved something else: net savings for the company through reduced water usage. “We have been able to cut our ground water abstractions needed by the water beds, creating a net saving on the site equivalent to the consumption of 7000 households,” comments Rothwell. “We have also cut our bill to Southern Water for sewage discharge of chlorinated factory floor waters, saving some £30,000 a year.”

But the company, which turned over £360 million last year just through its growing businesses, hasn’t stopped there. As the largest salad grower in Portugal and with interests in Spain as well now, transportation is a big issue for Vitacress and Rothwell says the company has been looking at ways to save money and carbon emissions on the road. “We have encouraged the haulage firms we use to invest in ‘mega-trailers’ in order to transport more salad crates in one lorry load. A standard lorry will take seven crates of salad [in height], but now we are able to go to nine,” explains Rothwell.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, where the company has its own fleet of lorries, it has been trialling lower carbon fuels. “We have trialled low sulphur fuels, liquid gas injection, ammonia and hydrogen,” he explains.

The business is also achieving savings through ‘back loading’ – filling lorries on journeys back from deliveries. The company often works with supermarkets, such as M&S and Sainsburys, to deliver goods to their stores when not delivering its own products.

Another action that Rothwell says has delivered significant CO2 cuts has been the elimination of third party contracts with Vitacress growers in Kenya and Arizona, which means the company has cut down on its air miles substantially. “For the first time, last year, we had a zero programme with Arizona and Kenya, which has had a huge impact on our CO2,” he says.

Meanwhile, to improve its energy efficiency, the company has been working with The Carbon Trust and Hampshire-based environmental consultancy, Clouds, to deliver better processes in its factory. It has invested in cutting edge software on its fridge compressors that run the factory cooling process. “Every time a compressor fires up it pulls a big electricity load so we have invested in computer control technology that minimises the number of times they start and stop. This is saving us over £100,000 per annum,” says Rothwell.

The company has lodged a new planning application, this time to build 15 ‘closed' cold chamber docking bays, whereby lorries collecting goods can back onto a dock with sealed fridge units, eliminating the need to have fridges open for receiving and taking out.

In another move, Vitacress has recycled around 30,000 tonnes of spent pea shingle since 2007 that it had been using for its watercress beds each summer and had stockpiled over the years. Through the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP), which promotes cross-industry resource efficiency, the company was put in touch with aggregates firm Earthline, which has taken the potential waste and reprocessed it for the utilities market in pipe bedding material, generating over 120 tonnes of CO2 savings and £240,000 in additional sales. “We use to buy 8,000 tonnes of gravel a year, but now we are recycling it ourselves and only buying around 1000 tonnes, saving us money and helping us reduce the amount being dredged and destroying our sea bed,” says Rothwell.

On the conservation front, Rothwell says Vitacress has been working with the Environment Agency, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust and Cain Bioengineering to turn 100 metres of piped discharges left over from the old salad wash system into pristine chalk streams. “Our factory and farm discharges now form a superb chalk stream on site, with thriving biodiversity. We have created fast flows, riffles and a pond, all with access for children to try pond dipping in these varied and exciting environments,” says Rothwell.

All of which means the company has been winning environmental awards hand over foot. In November, it won the Leadership category at the 2008 Hampshire and Isle of Wight Sustainable Business Awards, after having won the Large Business Award at the same awards the year before. The same year, it bagged the South East England Development Agency Business Award for Sustainable Business. “We had been doing a lot of this stuff for a while, but not shouting about it, but we decided to start publicising the good work we were doing,” says Rothwell.

The next big project, according to Rothwell, is to build a seven-acre wetland at the St Mary Bourne farm site that will significantly increase wildlife. It will cost around £50,000 to do and although it will have little commercial value for the company it will have an important environmental benefit, not to mention benefiting the company’s image. “About 80 per cent of this is about saving money and 20 per cent is about going that little bit further,” says Rothwell. “Our workforce would rather work for a sound and responsible company and our customers value biodiversity and their salads being washed in pure spring water.”

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www.vitacress.com