Firth’s new $30m plant in Auckland officially opens. / Supplied by Firth
Manufacturing business Firth Concrete is about to celebrate the opening of its new masonry block plant, built to meet strong demand for housing and infrastructure in the Auckland region and operating for the last few weeks.
Matt Crockett, Fletcher Building's chief executive of building products, said the new Hunua plant had cost $30 million to develop, was a significant investment and a formal opening event was planned tomorrow.
The plant has been running for two months and replaces Firth's ageing, dated 44-year-old East Tamaki plant, shut recently. Tomorrow morning, Papakura Member of Parliament Judith Collins will officiate at the formal opening.
The first blocks were produced in September, the company said and the production lines have a fast turnaround on changing moulds and products: what once took 4.5 hours to change will take less than 30 minutes, the company said.
Crockett said high sector demand prompted the development.
Statistics NZ said that in the year to September, 30,892 new dwellings were consented nationally, up 3 per cent annually. Non-residential building consents totalled $6.4b, up 5.9 percent. Regions with the highest value of consented non-residential building work were Auckland up $2.4b, Canterbury up $1.5b and Wellington up $615m.
The plant took 319 days to build and Crockett said the project was a response to rising demand.
"This is the first major investment in masonry manufacturing in New Zealand for many years. We have installed world-class automated systems that mix aggregates from our nearby GBC Winstone quarry with cement from our Golden Bay Cement plant, producing a range of high quality blocks, bricks, pavers and retaining wall products," Crockett said.
Fletcher had invested more than $400m in local manufacturing in the past five years and the new block plant would meet "significant and growing demand for housing and infrastructure in Auckland as well as within the regions."
Firth's new masonry plant, which cost $30m to develop.
The plant is 4900sq m or just under a half-hectare of floor space, built on a former quarry site adjacent to Winstone Aggregates' quarry, west of Papakura.
The old plant was at 27 Smales Rd in East Tamaki and the new plant is 20km away, at 489 Hunua Rd.
Crockett said the plant would bring 24 new jobs to the Papakura and Franklin regions.
The old plant had become surrounded by residential and light industrial properties, making it unfit for heavy industrial use in the long term, a company statement said.
Construction of the new plant on steep land meant the cut and fill of about 170,000 cubic metres of earth to create a flat site, the business said.
"Two years on the new plant features two new, state-of-the-art, five block machines which enable a significant increase in production capacity, faster mould change times, a more consistent product output and less repair and maintenance downtime," the statement said.
Cameron Lee, Firth's general manager, said capacity had been increased to the point where one of the two new lines at Hunua could easily cope with the production of both lines at the old East Tamaki plant.
The new plant is about 45kms south of Auckland's CBD and the company said it was well aware of Auckland's worsening traffic congestion.
So a new North Shore distribution centre in Silverdale was opened in June. That yard is stocked overnight to avoid traffic congestion.
Statistics NZ said ready-mixed concrete production in the Auckland region had risen from about 1 million cubic metres in the year to September 2013 to almost 1.48 million cubic metres in the year to September 2017, up 47.8 per cent.
Nationally, it has gone from 3 million cubic metres to more than 4 million in the same period, up about 33 per cent.
