Litecast’s new factory in Ansley Common, Nuneaton, is a 5,400 sq m (58,000 sq ft) building on a 60-acre site that the company has purchased.
Production capacity is 72,000 linear metres of cast concrete beams per week, compared with 42,000 linear metres at the old site, a mile away on the town’s Purley Chase industrial estate.
Excluding the cost of the freehold land, Litecast has invested £10m in the new facility.
Managing director Jonny Leroux said that the new factory was originally intended to be a replacement for the old site when planning began five years ago. “However, with sales as strong as they have been in the last year, we’re now thinking we may keep some of the old site operational as well,” he said.
Litecast will now be able to double-cast every day and it is aiming to be carbon-neutral.
“There is no gas on the site. We are getting heat for the moulds and the concrete from a ground source heat installation and electricity will be via a PV array on the roof, to be fitted in the spring,” Jonny Leroux said.
He added: “Coincidentally it is on the site of the former Earthspan beam facility in the 1990s. They were bought out by Tarmac. The four founders of Litecast worked there and were made redundant from Tarmac and set up Litecast with their redundancy money, so it’s quite poetic to return to the same site 25 years later.”
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