The Bagging Plant has an automated process whereby kiln dried sand is weighed to a pre-determined weight, passed to a bagging robot, before passing along a conveyor where to be stacked, by robot, onto pallets. Bag sizes range from 12.5kg to 25kg.
An issue arises when a pallet of bagged product, containing up to 56 bags, is found to have one or more reject bags. The process for dealing with this was either to manually de-stack the “good” bags and replacing them on the conveyor or empty the contents of all bags. Replacing them on the conveyor meant manually handling the bags for several metres and getting them over the key clamp fence. The alternative of emptying the contents of all bags to be re-processed, introduced potential exposure to RCS as well as having manual handling risks.
A set of gates was installed within a section of the key clamp fencing enabling a forklift truck to safely position a pallet containing the reject bag(s) close to the bagging conveyor. With controls in place staff could safely remove the “good” bags to place onto the conveyor.
Please see additional pdf for details of the design process
Benefits
- Reducing manual handling risk
- Reducing potential exposure to RCS
The newly introduced process reflects an enhancement and adaptation of working practices.