SUCCESS STORY GEKÅS SWEDEN

The benefits of maintenance Mr Nilsson: “I started my career on the workshop floor and I have worked my way up. “I have worked at a foundry and even a nuclear plant and my technical know- how and interest prompted me to look at how we can use our machines for waste management. That is how I identified the shortcomings in our preventative maintenance work”.

Mr Nilsson started working at Gekås in 2008. At that time, servicing consisted of fixing things only when they were wrong rather than working proactively with preventative measures. Together with Orwak a regular maintenance plan was established to determine the service intervals for the machinery and it has ensured that there is no downtime as a Recycling and sustainability on top of the agenda at the result of faults with the machines. world’s largest department store. GEKÅS IN ULLARED is one of Sweden’s most ”It would be large enough to park 38 800 popular and frequently visited places and it is trucks in, each with a 25-m-long trailer. It is thought to be the world’s largest department not easy to picture, but this is what the 3000 store of its kind. A department store with 4.8 ton of cardboard recycled at Gekås every year million customers and sales of 5.3 billion SEK a year equate to.” certainly generates a lot of waste and recyclables.

Inge Nilsson, who is responsible for the environmental work and the waste management at Gekås, explains the company’s sustainability efforts, which include operations in the store and in the warehouse, as well as within the “In the past, it was accepted that a company’s network of suppliers. Through a machine could be out of order the entire variety of measures, the aim is to minimize the morning. The machines were just run until environmental impact of the business’s day-to-day they broke down. But this just was not operations. sustainable: The bale would be 3 km long As applies to most shops and department stores, “The number of cardboard cardboard and plastic account for the vast part of boxes does not decrease Gekås’s waste streams. Mr Nilsson describes the just because a briquette work involved in recycling cardboard to turn it into new boxes: press has stopped”. “At Gekås we recycle so much By taking measures to ensure that the machines are in optimal condition, we cardboard, that if we were to substantially increase our chances of the produce just one large box machines working as they should,” Mr from the material, it would Nilsson concludes. measure 1 km wide by 3 km long and 4 km high.” Gekås uses a number of waste compaction units to handle cardboard and plastic. Balers compact plastic into bales and briquette presses turn boxes into briquettes. Greater and faster than the predecessor Through Gekås’s collaboration with Orwak, Mr Nilsson has been actively involved in the continued development of compaction solutions. For instance, he discovered that an older type of briquette machine worked much faster than a new one:

“I raised the issue and after some measurements by Orwak’s staff, we found that my comparisons were correct. The hydraulics of the old machine were better suited to outdoor temperatures, A responsive partner Orwak machines at Gekås making it faster. So my requirement was that the “When you work with people who really A total of 7 balers new machine should be as fast – and ideally faster listen to what you say, and who have good 1 x Orwak 3300 – than the old one: ideas themselves, you get a real sense of 1 x Orwak 3410 support and confidence that you will find 5 x Orwak Power 3420 “One outcome of this and of our the best possible solutions. collaboration is a new product, A total of 8 briquette presses A direct benefit of having implemented 2 x Brickman 2000K the Brickman 2000, which continuous maintenance for a while now 2 x Brickman 1200K Gekås now uses”. is that many of the machines that were 3 x Brickman 900K here when I started working at Gekås 1 x Brickman 300 “It is faster and has greater capacity than its are still with us and still working today. predecessor.” I am both happy and proud of our co- operation with Orwak. Space optimization for transport Gekås uses a large number of balers to compact plastic foil. It might seem natural to go for the biggest machine available considering the volume of waste, but Gekås has chosen a machine that can create bales in the exact sizes required. The Orwak Power 3420 makes bales that fit perfectly on Euro pallets. A bale can then be rolled out onto a pallet, making the height 80 cm.

Three stacked bales equal a height of 240 cm, which is perfect for standard Swedish trucks. In this way, Gekås can optimise space and place two 120-cm pallets side A chute leads the briquettes to a container by side, each loaded with three stacked bales, thus outdoors. minimizing the amount of unused space. Back to Mr Nilsson: “The smarter our approach to waste, the better the conditions are for us to profit from our waste management, or at least to break even.” ”Corrugated cardboard and soft plastics are in demand in the recycling market, so our recycling of these materials provides us with a revenue stream.”

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