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Reducing the Footprint

Faced with ever tighter energy demands under Part L of the Building F Regulations, as well as enhanced acoustic and security standards, the UK's systems suppliers could be forgiven for allowing environmental issues to slip down the agenda for a while.

Taking a tour round Duraflex's recently opened facility near Cheltenham, however, reveals that cutting waste and reducing other aspects of the company's environmental footprint or impact remain key drivers for a business which has been enjoying steady growth.

One of the key benefits to Duraflex's management of consolidating its extrusion, administration and warehousing activities on a single site has been the ability to more accurately measure material and efficiency losses. While efforts had been made across the old infrastructure to improve efficiencies, the new site enabled Duraflex to take this to a new level.

As well as improving quality control and investing heavily in new tooling/equipment, Duraflex has also been looking critically at its own housekeeping.

Contamination is a continuing concern for all extruders, but Duraflex has addressed the problem by setting its production line staff performance standards, and then allowed them to put in place their own cleaning and maintenance routines. These are performed in conjunction with exhaustive quality control checks, both alongside the extrusion lines and back in the laboratory.

The company has also given one person the responsibility for looking at waste management across the entire site. This has resulted in greatly reducing the volumes of non-plastic material going to landfill. All wood, cardboard, polythene and similar packaging are segregated, while water and energy usage have also been cut dramatically.

You have to speak to the transport manager though, to discover one of the non-production related savings derived from the integration of Duraflex's logistics. Rather than shipping thousands of tonnes of profile prior to national distribution from one part of Gloucestershire to another each week, material movements are now down to a minimum. Building the integrated facility has reduced vehicle mileage by a staggering 137,000 miles per year. This has enabled the company to take four vehicles off the road while the purchase of an 'Antipodean style' artic' and trailer unit will further rationalise deliveries to far flung customers across the country.

There were of course reservations amongst Duraflex's residential neighbours regarding the construction of such a large new facility, even though it stands on the opposite side of a thrumming motorway. The company duly carried out actual and computer modelled sound tests to measure the audibility of its activities within the neighbouring properties' bedrooms and living rooms.

The study recognised that the different sound frequencies generated by the machinery being used might be heard above the roar of the traffic. As a result insulated, automated, roller shutter doors have been fitted on the access to the extrusion hall and all fork-lift movements along one side of the plant are subject to a strictly observed evening curfew. Then within the main production area, each length of profile coming off the extruder is cut by a guillotine, rather than a howling saw. As Barry McCarthy the operations director put it: "It is difficult to justify the installation of a guillotine on price or quality grounds, but we are committed to improving conditions for our workforce.

"This is also the reason we have installed auto-stackers on all of the larger machines. It is fundamentally wrong in this day and age when outputs are hitting 500 kg per hour, to expect people to move all of that by hand. The operative's time is now freed up to carry out quality checks and to add value."

Irrespective of other legislative requirements, specifiers choosing the Duraflex range of systems can be sure that the company is waging a continuing war on waste. The environmental footprint of every manufactured product on the planet can be measured and Duraflex is determined that its will be made as small as is feasible using modern technology and good management practice.