FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 5 Finding a New Home

And these were exciting times. We felt like tigers; we were unstoppable, and we moved quickly.

my Director of Surfacing, asking about a planer he wanted to buy, a second-hand one. I said: ‘Let’s go see it.’ We drove out to look at it, liked what we saw, and on the way back I phoned Sean to ask if we had the money (it cost a few hundred thousand pounds). We had the money, and we bought the planer that same day. But when you are that busy, there are some things that you can’t do. I had to take a hard look at how I was spending my own time. It was becoming clear that I could no longer justify the effort that my colleagues and I were putting into CCP in Wales. It was a good business, and I had learned a great deal from it. But it was too far away, and it was distracting me from the more immediate and urgent concerns of the business. So, in 2002, after sixteen years of proud ownership, I had to sell CCP. eight years before, I had been sure that we could recycle the stuff that we took out of the gullies, rather than send it to waste. Jon Collins and I had not forgotten about this. We had been working on some ideas with a German company called Huber who had an office in Chippenham. At the end of 2003, we were ready to start building. We employed an engineer, Ben Titcombe, who was familiar with the Huber technology, and he and Jon set to work. Our new Drainage Treatment Plant (DTP), which we opened in 2004, was the first plant of its kind in the UK, and there are still very few that can match it. It had the capacity to deal with 30,000 tonnes of waste a year: that’s equivalent to the entire gully waste in London, Kent, Sussex, and W e were now settled into our new home at Rochester Way, and it was time for me to realise another of my ambitions. When we acquired Hawbury Cleansing,

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