Lees of Scotland
Business Stream supports iconic Scottish sweet maker to significantly reduce its trade effluent and generate savings
20 May 2022
As a responsible business, we are committed to doing everything we can to ensure we are trade effluent compliant. Working in partnership with Business Stream, we’ve made huge strides in reducing our effluent strength which has helped to lower costs and reduce our environmental impact
Lees of Scotland, established in 1931, is a popular manufacturer of branded confectionery based in Coatbridge.
The challenge
In March 2020, Lees asked Business Stream to help manage its increasing trade effluent charges which, at the time, were unusually high for a discharge of under 10,000 m3 per year.
Due to the high strength of the effluent, which had a settled chemical oxygen demand (Ot) of 13,918 mg/l and settleable solids (St) of 290 mg/l, the business needed to act to ensure it could meet its trade effluent consent conditions.
The solution
A team of Business Stream specialists implemented a tariff optimisation programme to ensure the customer was paying the correct trade effluent charges and, where appropriate, challenged any disputable charges.
A site visit was also undertaken to help develop a series of recommendations to minimise the amount of sugars and fat going through the drainage system. This included providing support to draft and communicate a new policy that ensured spills of solid materials from the manufacturing process were disposed of by either being swept up and sold or processed off-site to be reused, rather than washed down the on-site drains.
Lees of Scotland has been working hard to implement these recommendations over the past two years and, as a result, has reduced its effluent strength steadily from an Ot of 13,918 mg/l to an Ot of 519mg/l and from an St of 290 mg/l to an St of 37mg/l. More importantly, compliance is now up to 96% and their trade effluent charges have significantly reduced
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We’re fully committed to improving our environmental performance and are certified to ISO 14001:2015. You can find out more in our environmental policy. Our Solutions team are certified to ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 45001:2018.
