Waste Handling Upgrade Lowers Cost, Heightens OH&S and Enviro Levels

A progressive manufacturer in Perth has made key changes to its production systems that provide major improvements in efficiency, occupational health and safety, environmental control and energy efficiency.
Coastline Kitchens, which supplies kitchen and bathroom cabinets to developers and project builders in the West Australian market, installed the new Optiflow technology from Eximo (Australia) for waste handling and at the same time moved from beam saw operation into a nested based manufacturing platform.
By moving away from normal waste handling technology and implementing Optiflow, the company now handles all wood-dust and air borne particles using much lower pressures, thereby using less power than what would be required by a comparably sized extraction system it replaced.
General Manager of Coastline Kitchens, Mr Willem Vanderven, says the investment has ensured the company maintains its commitment to using the latest in environmental and OH&S safety systems for its employees.
“Before Optiflow, we had a standard bag collection system with a 45 kW motor which relied on the industry norm - high-powered suction of dust from areas where the machines were in operation," said Mr Vanderven.
“But recently, we went into nested based manufacturing on machining cells run by powerful software and with nested based manufacturing we need a lot more negative pressure to remove the waste, which the old extraction system could not give us.
“Optiflow draws and captures about 1.5 m³ of wood dust per hour whereas before this we could only achieve about one third of this volume.
“Optiflow gives us a lot of flexibility to move machines around on the production line floor, which is a good thing. Because we had to continue production while changing over to the new production cells, we had to do things gradually while introducing new machines to integrate and replace old machines.”
“Optiflow can be configured indoors or outdoors, suspended from ceiling structures, or positioned on pylons – it all depends on the individual requirement and footprint.