FDBusiness.com

UK dairy group Dairy Crest has won the 2015 Cornwall Sustainability Award for the Best Contribution to Resource Efficiency. The award recognises companies which have developed a product, service or campaign or who are operating their organisation using the waste hierarchy principle. Entrants submitted a report explaining how they minimise, separate and re-use waste for recycling, how they ensure that new products allow for reused or recycled materials and how new products can be designed for recycling at their end of life.

Dairy Crest’s winning entry highlighted the company’s renewed focus on good water stewardship throughout the dairy supply chain.

This year, Dairy Crest has encouraged its supplying farmers to measure and manage water use through provision of a unique, complementary on farm advisory service called ‘Waterwell’. Waterwell is designed to highlight the source and effectiveness of water use within the dairy enterprise. Farm water use is measured and benchmarked against best practice.

At the same time, Dairy Crest has improved water efficiency operations at its creamery in Davidstow, North Cornwall, the home of Cathedral City, the UK’s number one cheddar brand. Since its target baseline year of 2007/8, relative fresh water imported to Davidstow has reduced by approximately 30% driven by the reuse of water vapour produced during the evaporation of whey to produce whey powder combined with implementation of other best practices to measure, manage and reduce water demand.

Dairy Crest has also made a significant investment at Davidstow to introduce a new water treatment and recovery process which will maximise water reuse. Process water is treated to very high standards in biological and reverse osmosis membrane plant to enable reuse in Creamery operations minimising fresh water abstraction required for new dairy products.

Around 1.7 million litres per day of high quality water will be produced by the recovery plant for reuse within Creamery operations. This is equivalent to the daily fresh water needs of around 11,000 people. The reuse of treated process water enables the manufacture of new products at Davidstow without the need to increase the quantity of imported freshwater.

Dairy Crest’s Group Technical Director Simon Hewitt comments: “It is fantastic that the whole Dairy Crest team has been recognised for the company’s investment in water stewardship over the past few years. Resource management such as this continues to be a strategic priority for our business.”