Creating staff facilities inside a warehouse

The UK's largest supplier of British tomatoes to the high street is the APS Group. Headquartered in Cheshire the company has five sites and is responsible for approximately 30% of total UK production. The company's glasshouses produce around 500 million tomatoes per year which are either hydroponically or organically soil grown. Committed to sustainability, APS was the first UK grower to introduce CHP & C02 extraction for the growing of tomatoes and the first tomato grower in the world to have a fully closed loop Anaerobic Digestion system.

The company has recently adapted an old warehouse on its site at Drax, East Yorkshire into a temperature controlled packing and distribution centre. Seasonal staffing for the plant required the installation of a recreation room and bathroom and WC facilities inside two large portable buildings built within the warehouse.

The discharge of the waste wasn't so straightforward. With no gravity drainage in proximity of the buildings, the grey and black water needed to be lifted up and pumped along 70 metres to reach the mains drains. The company therefore called the professionals at Saniflo to find a pumping solution and a Saniflo representation duly undertook a site visit to establish the best solution for the job. The recommended product, a Sanicubic 2 VX lifting station, was specified and installed by the company's site facilities staff. Easy to install - the unit is floor-standing - it is purpose-designed for such applications. It features a 120 litre tank which can handle up to 40 m³/hour of waste and operates via twin pumps that normally work alternately to spread the workload evenly. In the unlikely event of a pump failure the working pump will assume the duties of the other to ensure continuity of service. Both pumps can also work simultaneously in the event of a large influx of waste. An alarm is supplied as standard for continuous monitoring of the pump and early alert to potential issues.

David Pearson is Group Facilities Director. He's exceptionally pleased with the solution;

"The team at Saniflo has been a dream to work with and the Sanicubic has literally enabled this project to go ahead. As a company that looks after its employees we wanted to provide good facilities and we couldn't have done this without the capability to pump the waste away. The unit was purchased from Wolseley Pipeline and fitted by ourselves. It was surprisingly straightforward and is working exceptionally well."

Related products

Sanicubic 2 VX