When Specsavers’ glazing arm, International Glazing Services (IGS), started to outgrow its home it took the opportunity to design a new base for glazing from the ground up, literally.
IGS had been housed within the same unit as its sister company, Vision Labs, in Kidderminster but the rapid growth of the business and the requirements of modern manufacturing meant a new home was needed.
Specsavers is very up front about its green credentials with a statement of intent within its annual review. This talks abouts its commitment to: ‘taking responsibility for the impact our business has on the environment and have adopted a risk-based approach to understanding, minimising and mitigating this impact.
This is conducted in line with our values and the responsibilities we have to our customers and our people, as well as our obligations in the countries in which we operate. Our environmental programme is an important element of our corporate responsibility approach. We understand that both global and local environmental issues can have a wide-reaching and long-term effect on our society, now and in the future.’
Scott Hughes, quality systems manager for IGS and Specsavers’ lens distribution arm, Lens Online, was one of the team charged with putting those words into action. He says even before a site was chosen environmental issues were taken into consideration. By housing the glazing facility next to the lens distribution centre and close to its former home, IGS immediately cut down on the need for transport, reducing costs and lessening the environmental impact.
Karl Biggs, continuous improvement and engineering manager, one of the leads on the project, says as well as outgrowing the old space there were other issues around power supplies, parking and further growth which all had to be taken into consideration. The job of finding a site in the area was given to Specsavers’ estate arm and it came up with a ready to use, brown field site right on the doorstep of Lens Online to complete the Kidderminster Cluster of Specsavers companies.
Before the soil was turned a major assessment was undertaken, says Hughes. Not so many years ago Worcestershire was the subject of flooding so local water courses including the rivers Stour, Severn and the Staffordshire and Worcester canals were all taken into consideration. Hughes says a clear understanding of how the three worked together was established. This provided an insight into any risks and spelled out IGS’s responsibilities as far as the local water company was concerned.
A New Site Forum was also created, says Biggs, to gather the wishes of the business, staff and other local stakeholders. This generated ideas not just for what the business needed but also what the staff wanted and the attitude of Wyre Forest, the local authority. This group met once a month and looked at all aspects of the build from bus routes and traffic to canteens, locker sizes and furniture to the needs of the glazing side of the business. It also showed what the new plant would look like within its environment.
For the staff that has resulted in storage and lockers, break-out areas indoors and out, smoking, and non-smoking areas. Outside IGS is surrounded by mature trees and there are plans for a garden area – staff have already spotted a partridge and a buzzard. Indoors there are cooking facilities, vending machines, table football and ping pong, a nod to the table-tennis table Specsavers’ founders used to create the company. Community projects are a big factor with fundraising and staff freed up for working days on local ecological projects.
The impact of staff and business transport was also part of the planning process. ‘Part of the consideration was understanding where people had to travel in from for work,’ says Biggs. ‘A key requirement was to keep the travel to work to a minimum. We have a community of people who naturally car share.’
Despite the new site having ample parking, this was a problem at the former site, Hughes says IGS is now in reach of a housing estate. This means those who walked or cycled to work still can and means future employees can live close by. Enhanced cycle storage, cycle purchase schemes and showering facilities are designed to encourage more staff to leave the car at home.
Inside the Kidderminster plant
The building itself was constructed using Breeam principles, says Hughes. The Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (Breeam) was first published by the UK’s Building Research Establishment in 1990 and has become the world’s longest established method of assessing, rating, and certifying the sustainability of buildings. ‘It was a conscious choice to get a good building, it wasn’t done for public kudos,’ says Hughes.
This scheme lays down principles for the build which ensures the best use of natural resources is made. Interaction with local services, the environmental impact of the building is reduced and the safety and quality of its use is optimised. This may be as simple as orientation to catch the best levels of solar heating, the use of the most thermally efficient materials or siting of everyday facilities.
Biggs points to the positioning of the bicycle shelter. It had initially been placed at the back of the car park but Breeam principles saw it moved to a position much closer where users would have less distance to walk and the conflict of cars and bikes would be reduced.
Breeam has five standards: outstanding, excellent, very good, good and pass. Hughes says as it was the first time Specsavers had attempted such a build, IGS chose the middle of the five but this still puts it in the top 25% of building by quality. ‘You can still have a nice car without it being a Rolls Royce,’ he adds.
The building has a number of features that can easily be identified as green but it is the future proofing and forward looking nature of the build that Hughes and Biggs are most proud of. In addition to IGS being green the business and staff numbers can grow without compromises having to be made.
As far as the building project is concerned the stand out ‘green’ features include an array of 13 electricity producing photovoltaic cells which have the potential to generate 38,000kWh of power. This can be used in the factory or sold back to the grid and used as and when makes most sense for IGS and has the potential to save in the region of £7,000 at today’s prices.
A water heating thermal array of panels provides hot water for the building. Rainwater is also harvested from the roof to be used for flushing the toilets. Water savings could be as high as £1,500 a year. An indicator board shows that 11,025litres of grey water were used last week, double the amount of mains water brought into the building. The total use of grey water recorded at 61,280l is almost double the 34,083l of mains water. This has the potential to have around 500,000l of public supply.
The wider management of water offers opportunities to further reduce environmental impact and cost. Simple sums provide the scale of savings on the water harvested and used for flushing toilets but outside the build can add to those. Commercial business are charged for water run off into drains so IGS has reduced its bill by installing a large soakaway for surface water.
This was achieved by using porous pavers for part of the car park which is laid over a soakaway. This means less run off and a smaller bill from the water company. The deregulation of water companies in April offers scope for further benefits, says Hughes, for Specsavers negotiations on a national level for water services.
The building itself has undergone extensive pressure testing to ensure it is airtight so its air quality and temperature can be controlled, says Biggs. While the windows, by necessity cannot be opened they have coated glass to reduce heating costs and the atmosphere is further controlled by air curtains at the large roller doors on the shopfloor.
The air, quality and temperature is controlled within the building by a massive air handling system which itself includes innovation and energy saving. The massive electric motors that suck in, recycle and clean the air flow have programmable logic controllers that only supply the required amount of energy. This means they only work as hard as they need to and are not simply full on or off. ‘This costs more initially,’ says Biggs, ‘but over time will result in energy savings and reduce the amount of energy wasted.’
The air handling system uses smart controls that monitor the outside air temperature to see if air should be recycled or drawn in from the outside to maintain an optimum temperature in the most efficient manner.
The other big factor in the built environment is light. IGS Kidderminster uses LED and halogen lighting throughout the factory. Hughes says it opted for dimmable lighting, which, though, initially, more expensive, allows greater control. Infrared controllers are used throughout the staff areas of the plant to sense if people are present and lights tuned off if necessary. As we speak, a bank of lights in the training room we are using go off as light levels rise outside and the lighting control system decides too much artificial light is being used.
In addition to lasting longer and providing a better light quality investing in this high tech lighting has had immediate effects. Hughes explains that in its old home IGS staff required task lighting at their work stations as the ambient level was not sufficient. ‘In this building we have the right level of light and we ended up with a benefit from that.’ Biggs said the firm saved £30,000 as a result of not having to install a second tier of lighting.
Where Hughes gets really excited is with the potential for future savings. Since moving in in February he has been collecting and collating data from the building management system which he says will build into a powerful analytical tool for the future. Comparisons between the old site and the new site will be made, but do not really tell the story. ‘You can’t really compare it to the old building because that was a 1970s building using massively energy inefficient systems.’
The next step for Hughes is to establish the baseline of energy usage required by the building when it is empty and then optimising its energy usage when it is under load. ‘We have more metering in this building than we have had before so we can look at things like empty wastage and reduce that. We are not quite 24/7 working so we can work out the needs of equipment running in the background – baseline’. Some machines may be running all the time but the lights can go off. There may be non-time dependent processes that can be run when IGS own PV panels are producing power. ‘At the moment it’s just a number but in the future we can really understand what this building can do.’
Artificial lighting is automatically balanced against external ambient light
A walk around the shopfloor in very unlike many glazing labs. The scale is huge (Optician 11.08.17) but the working environment is comfortable and airy. The processes have been designed to be as efficient as possible. The air temperature is kept at a comfortable 21˚C meaning some staff wear the uniform polo shirts, others the fleece too. The jobs are conveyored around to get to the teams of workers and there are no trolley-loads of trays being pushed around, says Hughes. ‘The work is going to the people. For some of the operators it cuts out a massive amount of steps.’
The manufacturing cells use modern equipment which are energy efficient and quieter, the floor has a modern, bright, clean, epoxy coating. The extraction systems are outside of the shopfloor meaning noise levels, even next to the edgers, do not require hearing protection.
Recycling of materials is also a big feature of IGS. At each workstation bins are marked up for waste while all cardboard packaging is recycled and minimised where possible. Biggs says all lenses use recycled paper, and all packaging cardboard and bubble wrap is recycled.
One success has been the recycling of dummy lenses but one frustration for Hughes is the use of swarf, the waste material from the lens edging process. The swarf used to be collected in 205 litres drums but now 1 tonne bales of the material are produced. However, as a mixed plastic byproduct it is not easy to find someone who can use it.
Savings are also being looked at in other areas. Logistics is an example where carbon and financial savings could be made by rationalising the number of parcels sent to practices down into a single consolidated delivery. Biggs says having a single delivery point from the three Kidderminster sites could have a big carbon saving.
For Hughes the excitement is the future. ‘I’m looking forward to the time when we have 12 months of data, then we will see what is really going on. We do not stand still, we have cut the ribbon on the building but people here are used to changes in process. The basis system is still the same but how we go about that will continue to change.’
In terms of the build Hughes says IGS has been a great learning process. ‘We are not saying this is the best green glazing lab there will be but it’s our first stab at it’. He says green buildings are the way forward.
‘We are not doing this for reward we are doing it because it quality and it’s the right thing to do.’ He says the build may cost more but: ‘We are definitely future proofing savings and we get a better result at the end.’