Recycling is more than Food for Thought

One of the largest grocery chains in Canada puts a large emphasis on recycling initiatives throughout the organization. One of the ways this grocery chain looks to capture funds is through recycling its box board containers.

The Balance Between Productivity and Safety

All most all products sold in a grocery store come in corrugated box board. From fruits and vegetables, dry goods to frozen food the amount of corrugated cardboard that is a by-product of the business is staggering. Realizing the potential to recover monies by selling the discarded packaging to specialty recyclers this company needed a process to get the boxes from the hundreds of stores and to the recycling companies. Understanding the recycling company will pay varied rates per kilogram of box board delivered, the engineering team at this grocery store needed to find a way incorporate the weight, store identity, as well as the transportation carrier into their data sort.

Developing a Process Map

Working with one of their transportation carriers on a different customized solution for over 10 years this grocery chain was interested in reaching out to explore options for their recycling project. The first step was to create a process map that details the type of data required, its availability at both the store and distribution centers as well the data required to detail which transport route is needed. It was determined that the following information was required to capture the right data so that the funds claimed could be routed back to the store.

STORE WEIGHT DOOR TRAILER IDENTITY OF PROUDUCT DOCK NUMBER CARRIER NUMBER

For over 15 years we have been incorporating printers and scanners through Bluetooth into our SkidWeigh Plus ED3 and ED4 platforms. This grocery chain also wanted the data to upload to their network so that admin personnel could collect the data, show proof of weight to the recycling company collect the appropriate funds and send the money back to the store. It was agreed upon that solution would be a customized offering of the ED4 system with a Base Station communication hub to relay the information to the network.

The customized solution would see the box board collected at the store and the first of three barcodes put on baled cardboard to identify the store and the product. The grocery chain would then pick the product and take it to one of their distribution centers depending on its servicing region. At the distribution center the forklifts with the ED4’s installed would first scan the bale with a long-range scanner and then lift the forks and the bale off the ground approximately 4 inches. Within 3 seconds the bale is weighed in kilograms and barcode data collected. The forklift driver then drives to the door and scans dock barcode.

The customized ED4 has an automatic process that doesn’t require input from the operator as the system advances to each required data input. The third and final scan is the carrier number on the inside of the trailer.

Once complete the system sends the information to the Base Station where the data is pushed to their network for sorting on a time interval of their choosing.