What are you doing to conserve environmental resources?

SanLucar acts according to the guiding principle «Taste in harmony with people and nature». First and foremost, we want to offer people healthy, delicious fruit and vegetables. But we also want nature and the people who work for us to be happy. Therefore, we attach great importance to resource-saving, sustainable and climatecompatible cultivation. Water is life and one of the most valuable goods that we have here on our earth – and one which we must use sustainably. On our South African farm Rooihoogte, for example, we have installed a highly sophisticated irrigation system that enables us to save as much as 50% (!) of water consumption. In our fields, a total of 25 probes measure the humidity and temperature of the soil at various depths. This allows us to reduce the amount of water in the soil, and special software tells us when and how much water needs to b  dispensed. The new system reduces our daily work and helps us to save water – with pinpoint accuracy.

At our SanLucar tomato oasis in Tunisia, we have also installed a special irrigation system and save 30% of the water consumption through treatment and reuse.

At our farm for strawberries and raspberries, a rainwater collection tank with a capacity of 7,000 cubic metres helps us to greatly reduce water consumption from wells. Together with the Tunisian research centre for water technology, CERTE, we are researching ways to further optimize irrigation. In our growing area in El Hamma, there is a thermal spring which reaches temperatures of more than 60 °C. We use it to heat our greenhouses from November to March and thus save a lot of energy. The mineral-rich thermal water is collected and cooled down, and is added to the irrigation water in fine doses. It gives the tomatoes an intense flavour.

At our headquarters in Puzol, Spain, our new office building meets the highest energy-efficiency criteria. We generate electricity from solar systems and, thanks to sophisticated, automatically controlled blinds, we can make optimum use of the hours of sunshine. In the winter we need to heat less, and in the summer we need to cool less – both save electricity In addition, energy-efficient LED lamps have been illuminating our warehouse in Ettlingen, Germany, since 2015 – and since April 2017 the office building, as well. Every year we save 90,000 kWh of energy and thus 45 tonnes of CO2.