“I don’t think in my career, there has been a project that I have been more excited about!”
As managing director of Futamura Chemical UK Ltd in Wigton, Adrian Cave is delighted by the creation of a renewable and sustainable alternative to finite, fossil-derived flexible plastics.
Based in Wigton for over 90 years, the company manufactures flexible packaging films that are derived from ethically sourced, certified sustainable wood-pulp. It is a long established but energy intensive process that reduced in scale globally with the advent of plastics from the 1970s onwards. Thanks to Futamura’s in-house research and development, the company has significantly updated the material’s environmental and packaging attributes.
Its production process involves chemically breaking down wood pulp into a liquid form (Viscose), before regenerating it back into a transparent film. This process predominantly requires steam, and to a lesser extent electricity, to operate.
A significant challenge the company faces both financially and environmentally is how it reduces the amount of natural gas purchased from the grid to create the required steam and electricity.
A project, supported by the government’s Industrial Energy Transformation Fund (IETF), involves capturing and using the sulphurous waste gases from its production process. The company will use a sulphur oxidation process (SOP) to burn the gases together with molten sulphur, itself a bi-product from petro-chemical industries, to create a high purity sulphuric acid to be used on site, as well as a significant amount of heat used to create steam. The process is performed by a wet gas sulphuric acid plant (WSA).
The steam generated by the SOP will substitute that which is currently generated from natural gas for its manufacturing processes, reducing the company’s overall natural gas consumption by 16%.
A grant worth £4,486,851 will contribute towards the £14m project at the Wigton plant which employs 270 people.
“At Futamura we are passionate about our NatureFlex and Cellophane products, and that includes ensuring we continually evolve and utilise greener manufacturing processes, to further reduce our environmental footprint,” Adrian Cave said. “Transformational projects such as this WSA installation invariably are expensive and have a medium to long term payback. Companies like ours do require support financially and this IETF energy efficiency grant has resulted in this project coming to fruition. We are very grateful for this support.”
The grant is part of the government’s Plan for Change to support low carbon projects in energy intensive industries.
Markus Campbell- Savours, MP for Penrith & Solway has welcomed the news and is due to visit the site today (Friday 30th May.)
“I congratulate Futamura on securing this investment, one of the largest grants to be issued in this round of IETF funding. This government is committed to helping industry reduce its energy consumption and this project will enhance the sustainability and future of this 90-year-old business. This is a huge boost to Wigton and the hundreds of workers employed at the site.”
