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Fonterra goes head to head against Synlait

Fonterra has received resource consents for a planned multi-million dollar milk plant for inland Canterbury at Darfield - just 10 minutes down the road from independent rival Synlait's factory at Dunsandel.A majority of the 60 objections focused on landsc

Chris Hutching
Fri, 03 Dec 2010

Fonterra has received resource consents for a planned multi-million dollar milk plant for inland Canterbury at Darfield - just 10 minutes down the road from independent rival Synlait’s factory at Dunsandel.

A majority of the 60 objections focused on landscape concerns and traffic issues. There were 88 submissions in total. A proposed tall chimney structure came in for criticism.

“...we do not consider the drier tower would be particularly offensive. Mr Craig (submitter) referred to it as a ―clean, simple structure. We agree; it would not be particularly industrial looking, although we also agree with Mr Milne (the District Council’s landscape architect) that a colour restriction would make the drier tower less obvious in most weather conditions.

“At one level, we do not see a need to prevent the use of the Fonterra logo, which makes each face of the drier tower technically an advertising sign, because from a distance of at least 700 metres it will appear no larger than a complying sign at the boundary. However, we accept the opinion of Mr Milne and the views of a number of the submitters that the addition of the blue logo at the top of the tower would in many situations be likely to increase the adverse effect on the landscape.”

The factory would occupy about 12ha of the main area of the site, and would be set back about 650m from State Highway 73 and about 680m from the nearest dwelling outside the site – The Oaks - an historic accommodation house.

The milk powder plant would process up to 2.2 million litres of milk per day depending on the season and would be capable of producing up to 16 tonnes of milk powder per hour.

The proposed factory will be a similar size to the Synlait plant on State Highway 1 in nearby Dunsandel, which also has the capacity to process 2.2 million litres of milk per day, and would be much smaller than the Clandeboye plant which can process up to 13 million litres of milk per day.

Brent Taylor, Fonterra director of New Zealand Operations described the nine existing Fonterra milk processing plants in the South Island, the increasing milk supply and inefficiencies of transporting milk for long distances for processing.

He said that the furthest any tanker would have to drive to supply the new factory would be about 40kms.

There is approximately 2.2 million litres of milk being produced and supplied to Fonterra from within a 40 kilometre radius of the factory site and the proposed plant would lead to a reduction of truck journeys of almost 20,000kms per day, on current milk volumes. 

Chris Hutching
Fri, 03 Dec 2010
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Fonterra goes head to head against Synlait
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