Kirkcaldy harbour will this year become a working waterfront for the first time in more than two decades.
The Forth Ports-owned harbour will welcome cargo ships for the first time in more than 20 years in a partnership development.
Construction work began this week at Hutchisons Flour Mill, a division of Carr’s Flour Mills Limited, in the heart of the harbour. This work will include new silos and conveyors to allow the fast delivery of wheat from coastal ships.
Carr’s, which mills over 120,000 tonnes of wheat a year at Kirkcaldy, has been given a grant award of more than £800,000 from the Scottish Government’s freight facilities grant scheme, which aims to take lorries off the road and have goods transported by sea or rail instead.
Nik Scott-Gray, the business development manager of Forth Ports, said, “We are delighted that Kirkcaldy harbour will become a working quay once again.
“The location of Hutchisons at the harbour ensures that this coastal shipping initiative delivers a continuous product supply to the mill while reducing the lorry journeys by around 4000 per year.”
Hutchisons Flour’s operations director Tim Hall added that the project would allow the firm to bring in significant quantities of the different wheats it needs by sea rather than by road, giving the company more potential to supply customers with consistent quality flours through difficult conditions of climate and volatile commodity markets.Lorries”We will also remove almost 250,000 lorry miles from Scotland’s roads,” he said.
The Hutchisons work is expected to be completed in a few months. Dredging work will begin in the harbour in the spring with the first cargo of wheat expected in the summer.
The project is a partnership between the harbour owners, Hutchisons’ parent company Carr’s Flour Mills which has two other mills in the UK, one in Cumbria and one in Essex and Transport Scotland, which provided the freight facilities grant.
The grant funding of up to £829,000 will enable the company to remove almost a quarter of a million lorry miles from Scotland’s roads every year.
Transferring these traffic flows to water will generate environmental benefits worth in excess of £1.3 million over the course of a decade.
Transport minister Keith Brown said the Scottish Government was committed to encouraging firms to transfer freight from roads to rail and water.
The Scottish budget passed last month announced an additional £2 million of funding under the scheme is to be made available for future applications.
“Not only will this grant awarded to Carr’s help reduce HGV movements on the trunk routes, it will also see better use of waterborne freight facilities.
“This is a clear example of the way in which the freight facilities grant is helping businesses to remain competitive while finding new and more sustainable ways to deliver their goods, contributing to a greener Scotland,” he said.