Reducing Carbon Emissions, Improving The Bottom Line - Sirromet wines

Our story at Sirromet, we’ve been here obviously ten years. You can sort of see here behind me we’ve got the vineyard that’s located at Mount Cotton and basically, an hour that way is our vineyards up in the Granite Belt which we’ve got about 300 hectares, up there. We bring all the fruit down on an annual basis and put it through the crushing, the pressing, and the bottling, the processing here. I just sort of wrote down a few things on what we could do, you know, what can we do to be more efficient here. You know, we’ve got the land, we’ve got a bit of space, and we just got a few guys together, what we call the blue-shirt people, and you know, we just sort of say well what can we do? Is it possible? So ask the staff. Throw a few things around. And it just seem to compound and get better and better. A few tech journals, a few magazines, we did a lot of research. We’ve got an analytical chemist here. We’re now involved with the EPA, the NPI reporting and they use us as a good sort of citizen, and so honestly it’s not hard. So basically set a plan, set a few objectives, few savings, put together some sort of reporting device, and get the staff on board. Simple. Some of the actions that we’ve sort of implemented over the last ten years has been like our worm farm. We’ve got a liquids/solids sort of recycling process that we can deal with seven and a half million litres of water and sewerage and liquid going through the place. And then we’ve got 25% of our solids that we, sorry the grapes that we bring in is solids and that’s skins, stems, you know, cardboard, paper, all that kind of stuff we recycle on site. And it was a no-brainer – a worm farm was maybe 20 – 30 grand to set up and deals with 400 tones. Really, that, over ten years you know, I mean it’s nothing really. And it makes the property better and just makes it feel good. Return on investment is an interesting one a lot of people ask me. Certainly from the company side of things, on capital it’s not going to be done tomorrow. It’s more about the ongoing savings on services such as power, water, waste, and just the general operation of the company, which some people said oh yeah it’s not much, but it is huge.