Brussels Airport has sunk the first pile at its €70 million, 83,500sq m Brucargo Central project and announced the five major tenants for the redevelopment at the heart of freight area.

At a ceremony to mark the start of construction on 22 November, chief executive of Brussels Airport Company, Arnaud Feist, said the scheme would increase warehouse capacity by 30% compared with the now demolished former buildings while at the same time offering an improved environment for workers at the site with more greenery and environmentally-friendly features..

Occupiers of the new buildings, when they open in 2025, will be DSV, which is taking a 12,000sqm building majoring on pharma and perishables; Nippon Express, which is moving from their current 4,500sq m warehouse close by to a new 10,000sq m building; EV Cargo, which serves the general cargo market along with a number of specialist areas such as aerospace; Deny Cargo, which has been at Brussels since the mid-1980s and is moving to a 2,500sq m building; and pharma and life science specialist Hazgo, which is taking a 2,000sq m site.

The five tenants will fill up the bulk of Brucargo central site, but negotiations are ongoing for the remaining 4,000sq m of space.

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Buildings on the Brucargo development, which covers the equivalent of eight or nine football pitches will all have a BREEAM-Excellent certification and will increase green zones by 20% compared with the old site as well as offering pedestrian and cycle-friendly access.

In an interview with ACW, Arnaud Feist said that Brucargo Central epitomised Brussels Airport’s strategy of increasing cargo capacity by taking down obsolete 1980s-era buildings and replacing them with more efficient new ones. “This way, we can increase capacity without adding to our land footprint. We started to redevelop our cargo area several years ago and we are now in phase 2 of the project, having invested millions of euros in new buildings.”

He said that while there could be a point at which Brussels would require new land for cargo activity, that was at least ten years off.

Nor were the constraints or airside capacity seen at some other European hubs. “We have a maximum of 16,000 night flight slots and we don’t need more, and we have no slot constraints on day flights either. In fact, all our cargo growth recently has been on daytime flights, as bellyhold capacity returns with the restarting of passenger flights. We could in fact double the number of flights, though that is not our intention.”

Brussels cargo traffic is split three ways between bellyhold, DHL and other full freighter operators.

Brussels cargo volume increased during the Covid crisis, Feist added. Belgium is a powerhouse of European pharma manufacturing and shipped 3 billion vaccine doses during the pandemic.

Post-pandemic, pharma remains one of Brussels key specialisms – it is the busiest hub for pharma in Europe and one of the top three in the world – along with e-commerce, express, perishables and live animals. It was the first airport in the world to achieve CEIV Pharma certification.

Around half of Belgium’s €100 billion worth of pharma exports move through Brussels airport with the nearby seaport of Antwerp accounting for a good proportion of the remainder.

Chief of cargo and real estate, Geert Aerts said that the tenants for the new Brucargo Central site had been selected because they were long term partners of the airport and also because their activity offered a “multiplier effect”, able to attract airlines and further business.

Cargo traffic was still very buoyant in Brussels, he added. While it is slightly down this year because of the recession, the decline is less marked than in other gateways and it is significantly up on pre-Covid levels.

The airport would continue its programme of demolishing older buildings and redeveloping sites with more efficient modern ones in line with its master plan, which aimed to maximise the amount of developable land.

He said: “Within the next five years we will increase available warehouse capacity by 25% – on the same amount of land.”

In partnership with the Air Cargo Belgium community, it was also providing technological solutions, including sophisticated systems to track the temperature of pharma shipments en route.

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EV Cargo branch manager Reda Baghdadi said that the forwarder had been talking to the airport about taking a site at Brucargo Central since 2017 and was one of the first companies to sign a letter of intent. One attraction of the site is that it is close to the airside, important for urgent items such as aircraft spares. It was also possible for forwarders based at Brucargo to gain direct airside access if needed.

EV Cargo had looked at off-airport sites “but we actually found that they were more expensive, and operating costs would have been higher too”.

EV Cargo branch supervisor Tineke de Vries added that the forwarder was currently operating from a nearby temporary location but was looking forward to moving to the new site at the earliest opportunity.