A Black Country pallet and packaging company has invested more than £1 million in a new renewable energy plant as part of its ongoing drive to lower its carbon footprint.
Nicklin Transit Packaging, one of the UK's largest independent pallet and packaging firms, has installed the biomass heating system at its main manufacturing site on the Woods Bank Estate, in Wednesbury.
The plant will be fuelled using the waste generated by the company's manufacturing processes and the resultant energy will help to heat buildings across the site as well as its kilns used in the manufacture of timber products.
The company said it would eradicate the need for natural gas for heating and burn the 1,000 tonnes of timber waste created by the plant annually, therefore reducing the need for skips and thousands of haulage miles necessary to remove the waste to landfill or repurposing plants.
The new plant will also enable Nicklin to increase its services to customers by enabling it to collect their waste timber.
Managing director David Nicklin, who is the fourth generation of his family to run the company since it was founded in Birmingham in 1913, said the move towards renewable energy was part of its plans to become a more sustainable business.
He said: "The looming climate crisis is the biggest challenge facing society and every individual and business has an obligation to do all that it can to ensure that it is taking steps to minimise its own impact on the environment.
"In recent years, we have taken a range of steps to reduce our carbon footprint, from investing in a fleet of electric forklift trucks to introducing LED lighting across our Wednesbury plant but the biomass investment will be a real game changer in terms of our aspirations to achieve the lowest net carbon position possible for our business.
"This is our biggest-ever single investment as a business and reflects not just our commitment to being the best possible business we can be but also our resilience against the backdrop of the challenges everyone has faced in recent years and our confidence going forward.
"This investment enables us to take the next step in our sustainability journey, provides us with energy security in a time of significant uncertainty and also makes clear commercial sense with customers and suppliers increasingly looking to do business with companies that share their values about the future of the planet."
