STANDARDS AND REGULATIONS
Don’t let regulations bring you down Capital investment when building or renovating a plant can be expensive. Even more so if you don’t follow council and building regulations. Food & Beverage Industry News explains.
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ed tape, bureaucracy, standards and regulations – all can be a bugbear for any company thinking of building or expanding their food and beverage processing plant. Food and beverage processing factories especially have a range of rules that dictate what they can and can’t do due to food safety issues. Problems arise when the correct planning hasn’t been taken into account, or even ignorance of what is required when building a premises. However, the latter is never an excuse for putting up a building without consent, although that doesn’t stop it from happening. It’s not lost on Total Construction’s design operations team, who has have seen their fair share of projects go pear-shaped due to naivety, poor planning, or disregard for building and council regulations. As the name
"Here’s a bit of advice – if the council says you only need 15 carparks, only provide 15. The reason being? If you provide 20 and you are going to do more works in the future, those 20 carparks can become your baseline. It is part of the development control plans that have been in play with any development project with councils." implies, Total Construction specialises in total builds – from the ground up and that includes getting all the right approvals. Total cites a recent example with a client that wanted to expand its premises and had done so already without getting the correct building consents. They were told to dismantle the illegal structures. The company came to Total Construction for help. “The client had put an awning
structure out at the back of the property to protect their roller shutter opening when they were loading and unloading food products,” said Rob Blythman business development manager F&B. “And then they built another structure to store equipment that needed to be protected from bad weather. You can typically put up a small tool shed in your back yard, but when it comes to a commercial enterprise, you can’t do that without
the correct approvals. “We understood what the issues that were raised by council and by the owner – what they needed to achieve and what they wanted from a building point of view,” he said. “To do that, they needed to amend the building considerably and make about a 30 per cent increase in the building footprint.” The client used its own architects, who managed to get the necessary approvals. However, the client soon realised that it still wasn’t big enough for what they actually needed. The Total Construction team helped to get the amended development approval through. If the client had done it correctly the first time, they might have saved themselves the best part of $25,000, according to Blythman. But it just wasn’t the footprint of the upgraded facility that needed attention. There were other aspects A company can save a lot of money if they get everything right at the planning stage of a build.
28 Food&Beverage Industry News | October 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au
