So, together with a team of specialists from MEIKO, Aurubis drew up a blueprint for its new BA/PPE cleaning facility. They succeeded in creating a cleaning process which maximises occupational health and safety and ergonomics, a result which has become a benchmark in its own right. The manual work involved in cleaning each mask was slashed by 50 percent to just ten minutes.
The quicker cleaning process enabled them to massively reduce their mask stocks: the number of full-face masks fell from 4,000 to just 500, half-face masks from 4,000 to 1,000, and air fed helmets from 465 to 220. Even with this reduction in its mask reserves, Aurubis still has enough capacity to offer external services.
"Thanks to MEIKO's support, we managed to reduce the amount of capital tied up in our breathing apparatus equipment by one million euros," says Michael Hauschild, summing up the savings Aurubis made by choosing MEIKO as its project partner.
When it came to building its new breathing apparatus and PPE cleaning facility – a project led by Michael Hauschild, who heads up the plant fire brigade and works security team – the company opted for the very latest technology from meiko.
Before the TopClean M machines were put into service, the company was running more than 120,000 cleaning cycles a year on its half and full-face masks and air fed helmets. Most of this cleaning work was carried out manually in a dip tank, a non-reproducible process which exposed people to detergents and disinfectants as well as taking 20 minutes for each mask. This was a highly unsatisfactory situation in light of the fact that the company was striving for a "Vision Zero" policy in regard to work-related accidents.
