| 65 Dutton Stormwater Stormwater maintenance brings multiple benefits Dutton Stormwater services sites throughout New Zealand, with a permanent presence in both main islands. T T Virginia Wright “If a stormwater network designed to take out all the contaminants before water is discharged wasn’t working properly because it was blocked up with sediments, those contaminants would end up, for example, in the water at Milford Beach.....” CONTRACTING Fifteen years ago, Ed Dutton was working for a stormwater device manufacturer when he recognised a need in the market for routine maintenance, a gap he decided to fill by establishing Dutton Stormwater Ltd. Ed is still a director and actively involved in the company today and routine maintenance of both stormwater and trade waste networks remains Dutton Stormwater’s core business, as business development manager Grant Buckingham explains. “Trade waste is the water that goes in through your car-wash business, or the grease-traps in commercial kitchens that take care of the wash water. It goes through an underground system on the way to the sewer network. “Stormwater falls on the ground and goes through a stormwater network before ultimately discharging into natural waterways like streams, rivers, lakes, and the sea, and we take care of the network that gets it there.” Grant has been with the company coming up four years, having joined five years after his wife, who is the operations manager. Their story is typical of the way Ed Dutton runs his business, explains Grant. “It’s not a family business as such, but Ed runs it as if everyone is part of the family. We met him when our daughters started school on the same day, and our general manager’s daughter also goes to the same school. “Ed likes bringing people in who are already part of his community, which gives us a sense of ownership of the business and helps when we have to have some of those hard discussions.” Dutton Stormwater services sites throughout New Zealand, with a permanent presence in both main islands. Their routine maintenance, particularly for big customers such as Breweries New Zealand, the Police, NPD, and Ryman Healthcare, to name just a few, follows a predetermined pattern with a schedule that means regularly travelling the length and breadth of the country Grant says the regular maintenance serves a number of purposes. “it protects the environment by making sure the systems designed to clear out pollutants before they get that far are working.,” he says. “It also helps ensure sites don’t flood, thereby protecting those assets; and it ensures the systems installed to meet the increasing demands of ‘discharge consents’ are doing what they are meant to be doing.” Increasingly, councils outside big cities (where they have been doing it for some time), require developments to install filter systems and water retention tanks, designed to mitigate the effects of an ever-increasing number of weather events. “If we weren’t doing our job properly, and a stormwater network designed to take out all the contaminants before water is discharged wasn’t working properly because it was blocked up with sediments, those contaminants would end up, for example, in the water at Milford Beach, or in Christchurch’s aquifers, or in Lake Wanaka,” explains Grant. “Wherever it goes, we want to make sure it’s cleaned up before it gets there, and to give the system its best chance to handle any event.” Dutton Stormwater recently won Excellence in Sustainability in the Auckland Business Awards, thanks to the increasing number of initiatives they are undertaking to reduce their impact on the environment. These include running their own worm farm, going through all the rubbish brought back from customer sites and splitting it out for recycling, transitioning all their fleet to electric, and recording all their emissions in order to calibrate their routes and driving hours and keep those emissions as low as possible. They may already be a winner, but Dutton Stormwater plan to keep working on what they call their small initiatives, as opposed to chasing carbon zero status, per se. They will continue to improve their own business practices, having an increasingly light footprint and taking steps to protect the environment, just as they do when caring for the country’s natural waterways. Industry leading solutions tailored to keep you moving Find a location near you! Scan the QR Code Motion is the leading distributor of bearings, power transmission, hose and fittings, seals and engineering consumables. We work with all industrial and trade sectors to keep them in motion. 0800 MOTION Motion.co.nz
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