New wind farm to power KCP production sites

Kimberly-Clark Professional, the parent company of leading household brands including Andrex, Kleenex, Huggies, WypAll and Scott, is celebrating a major milestone in its ambitious drive towards green energy.

A £75 million wind farm, built in just 18 months in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, is the largest wind asset owned by Octopus Renewables Infrastructure Trust (ORIT), a company managed by Octopus Energy Generation. Kimberly-Clark has a Power Purchase Agreement for the energy generated and this will supply around 80 per cent of its UK electrical power needs at the Barrow, Flint and Northfleet manufacturing facilities.

This is the global personal care giant’s first wind farm project outside of North America. The facility at Cumberhead will supply the company with approximately 160,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy every year. This will result in a total emissions reduction of 55,625 MTCO2e per year – the equivalent of taking 38,628 passenger vehicles off the road every year.

Craig Bowman, general manager, Kimberly-Clark Professional UK & Ireland, says: “It is responsible and innovative business partnerships and investments in new technology like this agreement with ORIT that enables us to make significant changes in this decisive decade and reach our decarbonisation goals.”

 “We adopt a life cycle approach to sustainability, starting by designing products to reduce consumption, reducing the use of natural resources and diverting our manufacturing waste from landfill. “This enables us to provide customers with high performance products and systems that help them reduce usage and waste. By reducing energy use (scope 1) and prioritising and using renewable energy in our operations (scope 2) we are reducing the carbon impact of our products (customer scope 3 emissions).”

The project is part of Kimberly-Clark UK & Ireland’s wider sustainability strategy and ambition to move to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030. To deliver this, the company is also working with Octopus on developing on-site solar power as well as green hydrogen projects.

See a short video of the opening event at https://youtu.be/8A7f4_sl3fM.