I'm Martin Howitt, I'm the managing director of Grantham Manufacturing Ltd.
This is a business which was started in the late Sixties by my father,
so I moved into it in the late Seventies as the second generation.
Moved it from being a gasket making business to the business
that it sort of evolved into today, which is specialist paper converting.
About 2014...
we had a factory fire,
and that destroyed all of our factory and all of our manufacturing capability.
So when the fire took place, you know, you're faced with a heck of a challenge,
you either fall over and run away from it or you get stuck into it,
and you take on a vast challenge of rebuilding your business swiftly.
We came up with a dream of how we wanted the factory to look going forward
in order that we can future-proof ourselves,
but that was going to take a big investment at that time
and a business looks rather critical when everything's burnt down.
You need to have somebody that's going to have a lot of faith in your business plan,
and I'm pleased to say that the relationship manager we've got with Barclays
bought into my dream as to how we were going to rebuild this business.
In designing and building a new factory
we wanted to make sure we built features into that to reduce its
carbon impact, so we applied for
and we got permission to put 272 solar panels
on the brand new roof that we were building.
We're now in a situation where we are generating
over a period of 12 months, 58% of our own electricity.
We also harvest our rainwater.
We've got a 10,000 litre tank in the ground.
So all the rainwater is gathered, filtered, and we can use that
in our processes.
In addition, we've got a ground source heating system.
We've got boreholes in the ground,
so the system is pre-heated by the temperature of the earth,
which is generally ten degrees, and that is what's responsible
for maintaining the temperature in the factory.
More recently, we've invested in a specially designed for us,
water cooled air compressor.
I'm excited to be a part
of seeing the third generation come into this business.
My two sons have joined and brought their own skills base to it
in order they can take the business plan forward
and into the future.
So the business now carries on trying to work at the sustainability model
that we've got, be it from sources of raw materials
or all the features we built into this factory
and I'm very passionate
that that's one of the legacies that I want to leave
behind in this business for the next generation to build on.