Ruscon organizes the first, complete steel shipment with durable parts as separation divider
Ruscon, the parent
company of the Dutch SmartContainer, introduces an innovative support-material
for transporting steel plates. A durable replacement for the wooden separators has being
used for centuries.
The parts, a polymer composite material cast in a cylinder shape, have
been developed as plate separation during storage and transport.
The polymer composite
materials are now used on ships from
St. Petersburg to the harbour of Ghent
(BE). These reusable separating parts on the cargo from steel plates will be collected at the harbour to be transported back to
sender. There is a deposit on the parts, a stick behind the door to make sure
they are recycled.
For this a new transport
scheme is being established by Ruscon,
to allow the use of these reusable separation agents. Also Ruscon takes
care of the full customs clearance for the loading and unloading ports and
exports the re-import for the seperators to Russia. In this way, the customer
receives a complete use cycle of this innovative product,
There the parts are light and easy to handle, the ease of use means
also, improvement to the speed of handling when loading and unloading the steel
plates.
Since the spring of this year, a test period has started on the St.
Petersburg - Ghent (Belgium) - St. Petersburg route. During this period, both
traditional materials and the polymeric separators were used for cargo
securing. A total of five test shipments were carried out and finally, on June
18, a ship was on its way from St. Petersburg with a cargo completely separated
by the polymer components.
A number of large steel producers have shown interest in using the new
separating materials. Therefore, in addition to the port of St. Petersburg, a
shipment will soon be prepared using these innovative separation technologies
from Novorossiysk.
Finally for the figures, approximately 20 m3 of wood is normally used
when loading a batch of 5,000 tons of metal. For this load of 5 thousand tons
of metal plates, about 50 thousand plastic bottles are needed for the
production of the composite components. The separation parts can be reused several times and
are themselves recyclable.
And the most important added
value is that this polymer composite material saves 13 thousand
cubic meters of timber and has a much longer life than that of wood.
IMS
(Courtesy: Maritime
Marketeer)