Brains in Material Handling
Every day is a new challenge to find the right balance between on-time delivery, optimal sustainability and minimal risk and the lowest possible handling costs per unit. As a market leader in automated sortation systems, Vanderlande Industries has developed a number of innovations in recent years to improve the performance, sustainability and cost effectiveness of the sortation process. Systems from small to large, benefit from the total solution approach that not only looks at the sortation system but focuses on the entire depot or hub..
Brains in sustainability
Sustainability is today’s main attention area. The focus on energy consumption and other sustainability-related aspects meets today’s demands from customers in the postal and express parcel industries. By supplying customers with energy-efficient systems, Vanderlande Industries offers them cost benefits and helps them to achieve their own environmental targets. Reducing environmental impact, for example by lower energy consumption of buildings and equipment, also saves costs and improves companies’ results.
Three main aspects determine the energy consumption per parcel handled: optimising utilisation, minimising mechanical friction and maximising efficiency. The findings from field measurements confirm earlier research results which show, perhaps surprisingly, that the biggest opportunities for energy savings are not in the sorter section itself, even though this is what most companies focus on. In fact much more energy is used by the conveyor belts, with more than twice as much energy per metre as the sorting unit itself. Energy savings of up to 30% can be reached by using the Vanderlande Greenveyor instead of the standard conveyor.
Apart from the mechanical and electrical optimisation of the conveyor belts, attention has also been given to the control systems. These are programmed to optimise energy use based on actual load, for example by automatically stopping a conveyor belt when no products are being transported.
(“Postal Technology International”, section from page 91, September 2009)
For more information about our sustainable parcel & postal solutions, please contact us at parcelandpostal@vanderlande.com, or call +31 (0)413 49 49 49.
