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COMPANY
REPORT
Bruno Lagneaux
was oversized in terms of utilities – there was a huge steam system – which was adapted to the needs of the much larger new tyre plant. We have a long way to go to change to the new production.”
The next task facing Lagneaux was to repurpose as much of the exis- ting equipment at the plant as possible. An extruder has been repur- posed to create made to measure uncured tread strips for each tyre. This in itself is interesting as one might have expected the tyres to be built by the strip-winding process, but no, the process is more akin to a new tyre manufacturing plant. This, says Pieret, turns out not to have been an issue as tread strips are also used at Black Star’s other plant at St Pierre de Boeuf.
Also repurposed have been two VMI tyre builders which are used to build the new retreaded tyres. Other equipment repurposed el- sewhere in the plant include a TW Micro-poise balancer, a uniformi- ty tester and a shearography machine used in the casing pre-sorting stage.
NEW INVESTMENTS
Of course, in addition to the repurposing of existing machinery, the planning of the new plant also involved investment in new equip- ment and facilities. The most extensive of these is the casing recep- tion and inspection area.
“Casings are important,” explains Lagneaux. “We have a long way to
Bruno Lagneaux: “It is important to understand the adjustment process involved in constructing the new plant. Everything at the plant was oversized in terms of utilities – We have a long way to go to change to the new production.”
go and are working with presorted casings at the moment, but we want to use tyres straight from the retailer. When we do that, the number of rejections will be higher, so we need to be more develo- ped.”
Black Star currently scrap 80% of their incoming casings and are gra- dually becoming more automated and improving their processes. As already indicated, company has reutilised some Bridgestone machi- nery in the quality control process. However, a key investment has been an MTP_TRI sorting machine from Regom, which uses Artifi- cial Intelligence (AI) to sort tyres according to brand, size and tread depth.
In addition to this, Regom, who are, currently building a new sorting site based in Burgundy with lean processes to optimise sorting to its utmost, say the MTP-TRI is able to maximise the efficiency of the used tyre valorisation process by identifying non-reusable tyres and automatically removing up between 30-40% of them from the pro- cess depending on the selection criteria entered into the machine.
Currently scrap from the factory is handled by IWIP, Mobivia’s was- te management department, but Black Star is actively looking at opportunities in tyre collection, granulation, pyrolysis etc. with a view to closing the loop as far as their tyre scrap is concerned.
Other areas where Black Star has invested include the creation of a buffing department to include three new TRM Eagle P 2004 bu-