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MCCULLA IRELAND WASTE-TO-ENERGY GENERATION DREAM FOR A GREEN FLEET BECOMES A REALITY McCulla Ireland started more than 50 years ago by David McCulla, the father of current business owners, Ashley and Carol. Initially this was to transport the McCulla family’s own cattle to Smithfield market, but while doing this, David spotted the opportunity to move into refrigerated transport. Today every truck in the fleet still bears the DMC initials as a nod to the company’s heritage, but the business has diversified significantly over the years, now providing a fully integrated cold supply chain, incorporating cold storage and bespoke logistics solutions.
ourselves using food waste. This has taken many years of planning and preparation, but working in partnership with Lidl Northern Ireland, we’ve made the ambition a reality and we’re honoured to be part of a real first for the industry and for Northern Ireland.
Operating from cold stores in both Lisburn and Dublin, McCulla Ireland has developed its facilities to include additional niche services, such as blast-freezing and up-tempering facilities. It now also has a specialist division called Certa, which focuses on pharmaceuticals and tech goods logistics, and in 2017, the company opened its own energy division called Alternity Biogas Energy.
“We use food waste collected from all 41 Lidl Northern Ireland stores to produce the fuel that is then used in the trucks that deliver fresh produce back to Lidl stores every day. This circular economy in waste-to-energy generation is just the start; we aim to eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels completely over the next five years.
The installation of an anaerobic digester (AD) plant at the site in Lisburn in 2017 allows McCulla to produce all of its own electricity for its coldstores, but the ultimate goal was always to use energy produced by the AD plant to power its logistics fleet as well. Speaking to Export & Freight, Ashley McCulla explained: “Just last month we launched our new IVECO S-WAY gas trucks which are powered by bio-methane gas that we produce
“Ultimately, as well as being the absolutely right thing to do, generating our own energy makes good business sense. We can determine all of our energy costs for the foreseeable future, we will bypass any air quality taxes that will inevitably become a larger cost to transport operators, plus our trucks will be cheaper to run. We are also finding that customers and procurement processes are becoming increasingly focused on having environmentally responsible suppliers, so having a carbon neutral business strategy and roadmap for its success, gives us a competitive advantage.”
McCulla’s Alternity Biogas Energy division uses an AD plant to powers the company’s coldstores and now also its green logistics fleet.
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McCulla Logistics S-WAY NP.
Challenges The launch of McCulla’s ‘green fleet’ has been a high point in what has been a challenging 12 months for the transport industry. “It’s probably an understatement to say that it has been challenging. With the pandemic hitting right when businesses should have been preparing for Brexit, the logistics industry has definitely felt the pressures. But we spent months modelling our customers through the constraints of Brexit to assist them with preparations and to try to plan ourselves. We prepared for every eventuality, including the introduction our own customs brokerage service, so that we and our customers would be ready whatever happened.” Despite these external factors, McCulla continues to invest in its business, which Ashley believes put it in the best possible position to meet the challenges of the pandemic and Brexit head-on. Its new customs brokerage business was set up to help, not only existing McCulla customers, but any importer/exporter with customs formalities for goods moving across the Irish Sea – either from GB to the island of Ireland or from Ireland to GB.
