“Sustainability is a vital policy for us”
SmartClad General Manager, Jeff Tanner:
“We source all our logs from sustainable plantation forests found around the Bay of Plenty, Waikato and Poverty Bay and choose with great care to ensure they meet the specifications of the products required from them.
To be competitive as well as cost effective, optimizing the timber to reduce wastage is vital. To this end we are using OptiCut technology from Michael Weinig to maximise the amount of timber we can use.
It goes beyond that though. Being efficient everywhere in the operation is important. A good example is the use of waste sawdust and shavings as bio fuel to produce heat for the kiln drying operation.
Increased production has also meant the need for an efficient dust extraction and collection system. To this end we recently had dust extraction specialists Viking Ironcraft manufacture and install a collection system and hogger with a 50,000 cubic metres per hour air volume, which enabled us in turn to increase our recovery of waste by between 30 to 50%. The hogger reduces the waste further in size, enabling existing waste storage bins to hold approximately one third more waste and making the heatplant for the kilns more efficient.
I believe, sustainability is paramount to a profitable future”
