New Zealand Engineering 1999 September

Food & Bioprocess

Powder Plant Expands

Relationships

Drive along State Highway One at Te Rapa near Hamilton and you see a familiar sight - the Anchor Products milk powder plant. Look more closely and you will see many changes as well.

One of the most obvious is the appearance of a $1.8 million interchange which takes milk tankers and other vehicles headed for the factory under the main road – all part of a $165 million expansion which has lifted manufacturing capacity by a massive five million litres of milk per day.

Another is the glass construction of the west wall of Anchor’s new milk dryer building. Not only is this visible from the main road but it also gives visitors to the plant an intriguing view of operations.

The first milk went through the plant on 31 July just 12 months after construction began, a feat which required some creative solutions to a number of unique engineering challenges – including the new interchange.

Not the least of other challenges, however, were those that arose around the methods of discharge of treated stormwater and wastewater into the Waikato River which runs near the eastern border of the site – and site landscaping.

One particular sticking point was over how to dispose of the water taken from the river and used in the plant primarily for cooling.

While initially the plan was to pipe the treated water back into the river, the Tainui Maori Trust Board objected saying such disposal ran contrary to Maori cultural values. Its view was that all spent water should be returned to the land for it to regain its spirit before re-entering the river.

Enter Alan Muller, project manager in the Hamilton office of Opus International Consultants which, among other contracts for the project, designed and managed the construction of a new wastewater treatment plant for the Anchor site.

"In itself this was quite a challenge," says Mr Muller. "We had to design a discharge conduit specifically for this project which allowed for the overflow to actually go under the river. To do this we began by building models in our testing lab in Wellington."

Opus came up with the idea of discharging the water through a flume. This was achieved by digging a trench into mid-river, pumping it dry, and then laying a pipe filled with river boulders and covered over.

"The water now runs over the boulders – and therefore has contact with the earth to meet the Tainui concerns – and into the centre of the river. This also has the advantage of avoiding contact with the river edge where the ecosystem is fragile and can potentially be damaged by any discharge," Mr Muller says."This way we don’t change the nature of the river bank."

The other major resource consent issue that faced Opus was landscaping. A number of big berms were built around the site to screen it from neighbouring properties and the entire site was stripped of exotic trees and replanted with native specimens. Some 30,000 plants have been put in including 1400 trees on the opposite side of the river.

"Extensive planting of trees and shrubs has occurred all around the edges of the site. It is a real parkland now," says Mr Muller.

The overall expansion project – which involves the construction and installation of three new milk evaporators and will make Te Rapa the largest site of its kind in the world – will enable the plant to process eight million litres of milk a day. Previously Te Rapa had been able to handle just three million litres a day.

It produces high quality milk powder and cream products including instant whole milk powder, agglomerated whole milk powder, standard whole milk powder, skim milk powder, cocoa base, cream cheese, consumer butter and frozen cream.

Relationships
The Te Rapa plant was first opened in 1967 and the expansion means it is now one of the most technically advanced in the world, able to manufacture complex milk powders at the rate of 19 tonnes per day.

Ross McCowan, Anchor Products general manager, engineering and projects, says evaluation of the project was undertaken in mid-1996. Consent applications were prepared and then lodged in January 1997 and hearings took place in mid-1997.

The project financials were prepared and in November 1997 the project received board approval to proceed subject to the resolution of the consent issues. These – including the Tainui appeal – had been resolved by late July 1998. On-site work began almost immediately from that time.

Anchor Products appointed Babbage Consultants of Auckland to manage the project on its behalf and administer all contracts. Murray Harding of Babbage was appointed project manager.

Mr McCowan says the project has been a very successful one.

"It is a reflection of the amount of planning we put into it and the efforts to develop a partnering relationship with all the main contractors. But it was also a reflection of the depth of experience we were able to call on within New Zealand and more specifically Waikato."

Murray Harding has similar sentiments. He says there has been a deliberate effort to generate good relationships between the contractors, which has been helped immensely by the fact that many have worked together previously on other projects.

Mr Harding, who has experience in both Australia and New Zealand on similar projects, says the Te Rapa upgrade is the largest he has been involved with.

A number of innovations introduced have helped contractors immensely in meeting the 1 August deadline for completion – a fact which has meant that construction was always going to be on a tight timeframe.

One of these has been a partnering charter. Under the charter, Anchor and the main contractors have entered an agreement to work as a common team with trust, respect, responsiveness and communication, and to foster personal and social relationships between all employees.

Mr Harding says there is no doubt this has helped develop a friendly, positive attitude on site, which in turn has led to genuine collaboration.

Another development for both Anchor and Babbage, was that the building contract was awarded as a subcontract to the main equipment contractor, MBL. Mr Harding agrees that this step helped with efficiencies and contributed to the smooth and rapid progress of both building work and plant installation.

The major processing part of the project was divided into three contracts:

• Milk reception, treatment, standardisation, tanker CIP and associated civil works
• Evaporation and spray drying plant
• Powder transport and packaging.

The project is part of Anchor’s strategy – developed in 1993-94 – to restructure its dairy production business to a number of megasites of which Te Rapa is the largest (Anchor is the largest business unit of the New Zealand Dairy Group, accounting for about 75 percent of the Group’s annual turnover).

Although the deadline for commissioning the expanded plant was due on 1 August 1999, in fact this process has been undertaken progressively.

"As much as possible we wanted to stage out the commissioning," says Mr McCowan. "In fact the first part of the contract we commissioned was the new interchange. This was opened last Christmas. This was followed by the installation of the new tanker washers, both internal and external.

"The majority of the packing equipment, including palletising, has already been tested on powder, and all service equipment such as chilled and treated water was commissioned early and tested under artificial loads,"

The plant will start with a small run of production – just 100,000 litres – and work up progressively over the next month to full expanded capacity of five million litres a day.

Ross Barrett is a freelance journalist