The dairy industry will be looking on with interest as Murray Goulburn (MG) constructs two identical greenfields pasteurised milk processing plants in Laverton in Victoria and Erskine Park in NSW.
MG, which makes Devondale branded products including UHT milk and cheese, began construction last year after announcing a $2 billion, 10-year contract to supply and produce private label daily pasteurised milk for Coles from the middle of this year.
The deal will see MG re-enter the daily pasteurised milk market, enabled by the new plants that are costing the company $120 million.
The dairy giant has described the move as “the most significant investment in dairy processing technology since the dairy industry was deregulated in 2000”.
According to MG, the move is also significant given that the daily pasteurised milk segment is currently mainly supplied by foreign-owned companies that repatriate their profits to overseas shareholders.
With the contract starting from the middle of this year, however, the pressure is on to have the two facilities commissioned by July.
The Laverton site is located next to MG’s existing distribution centre, and the second Erskine Park plant is being constructed in western Sydney, just 15 minutes away from Coles’ distribution centre.
According to MG, the new plants will incorporate the world’s latest processing technology to deliver the highest possible quality standards, and will at the same time help position Devondale as the nation’s most efficient producer of daily pasteurised milk.
Each facility will be capable of supplying up to 150 million packaged litres of milk annually to Coles supermarkets, but given that MG is a co-operative, it must also ensure the contract provides Australian farmers a guaranteed demand for a good quality, affordable milk, so it will be under pressure to make the contract viable.
This, together with the very tight time constraints, was the reason behind the identical design of the plants, according to Andrew Buckley, national leader for food and beverage at pitt&sherry, the engineering company chosen to design and project manage the construction.
“To aid this we have developed one above-ground design that will be duplicated on both sites,” Buckley says.
“This not only reduces the design timeline, but also significantly reduces building construction time and cost.”
The company also sought to deliver solutions that reduce capital cost by minimising energy use and environmental footprint (see box) while allowing for future expansion paths, through material reductions such as steel member, foundation and wall-thickness sizing.
The design also aims to be flexible with regard to accommodating expansion, its adaptability to the second site and ease of disassembly at the end of the plant’s life.
For instance, it uses a column-less design to allow for greater flexibility to accommodate future process changes and also ensure easy disassembly at the end of life.
This included taking into consideration details on pathways for expansion, such as blow fill bottles and more cold store capacity, and ensuring the design was modular enough to easily accommodate these future changes.
pitt&sherry also sought to ensure the building design for Laverton could be transferred to Sydney. The process of transfer of the design was threefold. First, it had to select land in Sydney that would allow this to occur.
Secondly, the building has been designed to be modular in the event that changes had to be made, so they could be undertaken effectively and efficiently. For example, the energy plant building orientation has been changed in Sydney to suit the land, without any effects on capital cost and time to build.
Thirdly, the building needed to have an appearance that could be cost-effectively altered to suit the different urban contexts and planning codes that exist in NSW compared to Victoria.
The modular and duplication design also allowed for economies of scale when tendering the building, therefore reducing capital cost and time to build on the second site. For instance, workshop drawings for the structural steel were already complete and signed off so pitt&sherry only had to build the steel system twice.
According to Buckley, the Laverton site is now at lock-up stage, and around 75 per cent of internal wall and ceiling panelling is complete. In January, equipment from packaging company Icon and processing equipment GEA will begin to be installed. At Erskine Park, the steel work is up.
“Sydney was always going to lag Melbourne by a month or so,” Buckley says. “The design for Melbourne was done in such a way that it is transferable to a Sydney location.”
pitt&sherry has built four major dairy facilities in Australia in recent years, including a milk powder processing facility for Tasmanian Dairy Products (TDP), of which MG is a joint venture partner.
According to pitt&sherry, the successful delivery of that project, under a rigorous design and development timeline of just 14 months, helped it win the current project.
Lean and green credentials in a nutshell
pitt&sherry has sought to reduce capital cost and minimise the company’s energy footprint in the following ways:
- Stormwater and trade waste systems were designed to prevent uncontrolled discharge from the site and are diverted into an on-site trade waste treatment or into a bio-retention system that combines detention, infiltration and a collection system with an infiltration trench, ensuring that all run-off is treated before entering the natural water system.
- Rock excavated from the site was also used to build a sea wall at Mt Martha, and by-product from a nearby quarry was used as engineered fill to build up the pavements.
- Energy efficient systems will reduce the running costs of the plants. Built-in heat exchangers on the air-handling units pre-condition incoming fresh air with the exhaust air, providing a significant saving of energy use for ventilation, with savings of up to 50 per cent of the energy required to run the system.
- The oil-less refrigeration compressor technology to be used at the plants has greater energy efficiency than conventional refrigeration.
- Once the plants are operational, the metered in and out electrical inputs will assist in the implementation of future energy improvements.
