Witham Group continues to reduce their environmental impact
- After celebrating their 100th year anniversary in 2021, Witham Group are now looking forward to the how their business can reduce its impact on the environment for the next 100 years and beyond
Traditionally, the lubricant industry requires additives, chemicals and fossil-based energy in order to produce a wide range of essential products. However, Witham Group been working for a number of years on ways to challenge the way their products are produced, supplied and disposed of, and the bigger issue of their environmental impact.
The outcome has been a unique ‘greener culture’, and a commitment to making a real difference both in the way they run their own business, but also to their customers’ supply chains too.
The company’s new, blending system, using ultrasound, dramatically reduces the energy traditionally needed from fossil fuels to manufacture lubricants. This is a global first in the entire lubricant industry.
“Blendtek”, as the process is called, removes the need for base oils and additives being heated at all, therefore eliminating the use of traditional gas and or oil fired boilers for heat energy.
As manufacturers of a huge range of different lubricants, this new technique enables Witham to blend thousands of tonnes of products using energy from solar panels and a simple 13amp plug, saving time, energy and drastically reducing their carbon footprint. To blend a simple 10 tonne batch of oil product now takes less than 20 minutes, whereas previously the same batch would have taken 3 to 4 hours to complete in total.
Customers using carbon neutrally blended lubricants in their supply chain can reduce in turn their own impact which is a powerful statement when achieving and promoting their own sustainability goals.
Witham Group have developed a growing range of award-winning, high performance, environmentally sensitive and biodegradable lubricants including Biolube, Prolan and Enviroyl, just to name a few. These products are all designed to either reduce environmental impact, decrease engine emissions. improve fuel economy and or help the end user have quality products with less toxic affect.
With new products including a new range of non-lithium based greases in the pipeline, they are continually innovating to provide customers with ’greener’ choices, and removing the need for traditional harmful products.
Prolan in particular is gaining a great deal of interest. Prolan lubricants are truly remarkable long lasting, non-toxic and water safe products, which give outstanding lubricating results, reduce wear and save time and money on the usual multiple re-applications.
The Prolan range is non carcinogenic, biodegradable and environmentally safe. It has excellent rust protection properties and completely frees up rusted and stuck parts.
Prolan works on almost any surface including metal, rubber, steel, vehicles, vinyl and painted areas. Each of the 5 viscosity grades offer specialist benefits which include staying on in harsh conditions, lifting rust scale, resisting acids and alkalis, removing dirt and grime and of course eliminating squeaks!
There are many ways in which Witham Group are reducing and recycling packaging and making it simpler for its customers to as well. Their plastic lubricant containers are made from a minimum of 30% recycled materials and they offer a recycling scheme for all 200 litre metal barrels. In addition, they use reconditioned pallets in their warehouses and measure and assess all packaging use using a specialised packaging waste dashboard.
Safe and clean oil storage solutions
The company’s popular bulk storage solutions are another simple way to reduce businesses’ environmental impact. Helping to keep workspaces clean, tidy and safe, they supply a specialist range of bulk storage tanks to meet workshop and business’s lubricant needs and fill them up using a colour coded and product labelling system.
By using these tanks and reducing the need for individual packaging drums, this system also helps avoid oil contamination, and offers good workshop practice. With good maintenance tanks will last for over 50 years – which means a lot of years of less packaging!
