It’s not just the logo that is green! At Paws Pet Food we are committed to earth friendly manufacturing and minimal environmental impact.
A £9 million investment in the state of the art odour abatement system at Plocks Farm consists of large dry filtering, air corridor, 5 wet scrubbers and 5 large biobeds (two filled with pumice stone and 3 filled with bark, which give a media for bacteria to eat away smelly pet food particulates). This significantly reduces all odours from the site from 17,000 European odour unit (ou/e) in the mill, to a tiny 100 ou/e that is emitted out of the biofilter beds.
Paws Pet Food partners currently recycle and re-use all of our water on site via our two wastewater treatment works, water is used for wash-downs, irrigating the biobeds for the bacterial life and wet scrubber systems.
Keeping to its farming roots, Paws Pet Food partner still owns around 500ha of surrounding agricultural land. We continue to spread high nutrients solids from the wastewater treatment works onto the arable farmland, to which it crops. Come harvest time the crop is then transported from the fields and the crop (currently cropped with oats) is used in the pet food kibble production.
Our team have just planted an additional 3,000 trees and shrub to add to the previous 10,000 trees and shrubs planted, as well as the recent implementation of bat boxes, bird boxes and creation of wetland areas by further improvements to the river bank areas surrounding the site (we even have had a couple otter sightings in the surrounding River Douglas!). This does not only increase biodiversity, ecology and wildlife around the site but helps to minimise the visual impact of the surrounding landscape on our local community.
We are currently reaching a 98% total recycling figure at our partners site, as our on-site Recycling Plant works meticulously to separate cardboard, plastics, metals, paper and all other recyclable materials, significantly helping us to get to the extremely low figure of 2% of all site waste sent to landfill.
Our partner has recently started a new research and development collaboration with a local University, this is comprised of research projects upon our recycled water treatment plant and odour abatement facilities to increase our performance, as well our patners Environmental Department giving site walk’s and guest lectures for the Environmental and Geoscience Department at Edge Hill University, again demonstrating a strong working relationship with our partners local community.
When it comes to sustainable eco-friendly pet food manufacturing our partners continue to set extremely high standards. Minimising environmental impact whilst maintaining strong links with the local community and key stakeholders continues to be a key focus.
