Blessed: Eco Tanks celebrates 20yrs
ECO TANKS, the roto moulding group, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. The business has grown from a single factory producing nine tanks a day to a group with four plants manufacturing up to 15,000 tanks a month.
The celebrations at its East London head office were marked with humility because the directors and staff believe it’s their faith that got them through. That, and the helping hands they received along the way.
The rotationally moulded water tank market in South and southern Africa is ultra-competitive, partly due to the relatively low barrier to entry (the machines and moulds are lower priced than for blow or injection moulding). Also, because of a widespread need for water tanks, and because tank manufacturers need to be as close as possible to customer markets (to control transport costs).
In addition to the East London HQ, Eco Tanks has opened three other plants (Gauteng, KZN and Cape Town), proving its national competitiveness – only one of a few to accomplish this.
25 Million litres of water a month
“To grow a business from nothing to one with four factories doing a combined conversion of polymer into tanks of between 400 and 600 tons a month is not a small achievement. If all of those were 2,500-litre tanks, it would translate roughly into more than 25 million litres of water storage delivered per month,” notes Eco Tanks managing member Pieter Oosthuizen.
But it was not always so. The company was established on a shoestring in 2004 by Pieter Oosthuizen, Nick Horne and Darren Hanner with little to no manufacturing experience, let alone roto moulding. Pieter was running a King Pie franchise and Darren and Nick were involved in sales with East Coast Agencies. At first, they operated from premises on a farm outside East London, but the technical challenges of the roto process made the startup difficult.
The company’s first machine, a second-hand shuttle roto unit, did not perform as intended – it didn’t shuttle. Pieter, a qualified industrial engineer, then built a second roto machine because one of the machines was too slow while having to cool inside the oven. They then bought a farm and constructed a shed to house the plant.
The four years to 2008 went by in a flash and by then those machines were worn out and difficult to keep running. By 2009 the white flag was about to go up when the flow turned slightly in their favour. Paul Kluge from KRM Plastics, a roto moulder at Memel in KZN, invited the team to visit. This may have been the catalyst that led to the turnaround: the business moved to new premises in an East London industrial zone and they built the first copy of the shuttle machines they saw at KRM. The first was running in January 2010 and then a second machine in May of the same year.
In 2012 they bought the premises in Wilsonia, East London, from which the company still operates.
The following year they purchased a Reinhardt machine in India. One of the top-performing roto machines internationally, the purchase proved to be a game-changer and production stepped up. The machine produces a 5,000-litre tank of 75kg in a cook time of just 20 minutes.
Eco Tanks then began its first expansion – something it would later be well known for. The Pretoria plant opened in May 2014, opening access to the Gauteng market. In September 2014, the KZN plant followed suit.
The company structure then changed for Eco Tanks to manage all operations in-house. Pieter did the operational management and technical work and Nick Horne became the national sales and marketing manager. Eco Tanks became more competitive in the market and Nick and his team now had enough tanks to sell.
Forges ahead
Eco Tanks continued to forge ahead. In 2015, the Pretoria plant moved to its own premises in Klerksoord and in 2017 a plant opened in Cape Town. It was a slow start and the plant first functioned as a depot, but things started to snowball with the first machine commissioned in September 2017. The Cape initiative was prompted by the extreme demand for tanks during the Western Cape’s “day zero” crisis. Eco Tanks installed three machines, and then the crisis faded like an overnight storm. The Cape plant in Killarney has downsized to manufacture the group’s smaller leisure and consumer goods.
In 2019, the Pietermaritzburg team moved into a purpose-built factory, and in the same year, a new machine that produces a 7m-long abalone trough was installed in East London.
The Eco structure has remained almost unchanged since 2018, with dedicated managers steadily running the branches and tank production.
Blessings on way
There have been several blessings along the way: one of the directors suffered a serious electrical injury that miraculously cleared up in record time and in 2023 a fire broke out early one morning in a raw material store at the East London plant. Again, miraculously, there was no wind that day, preventing injury to staff and the conflagration from spreading to other parts of the premises so production could continue unhindered.
Now, 20 years later Eco’s unrivalled product range consists of vertical rainwater harvesting tanks, vertical tanks for chemicals and acids, horizontal and transport tanks, septic tanks, wastewater systems, as well as dog kennels, cooler boxes and swimming pools. Eco also supplies the mining and construction sectors with various bespoke products and the agricultural sector with silos, grain storage, and coops. If that’s not enough, Eco offers fully customised moulding options including product R&D.
“Going from producing just nine tanks a day to 15,000 a month was no easy feat. This all took a lot of careful planning, strategic investment and, more importantly, the collective effort of everyone involved,” Pieter points out. He thanked customers, suppliers and friends at the celebration event in East London in October, and especially the families of employees who, on several occasions, missed out on special family events because of work commitments.
