Ruscon, the parent company of the Dutch SmartContainer, introduces an innovative support-material for transporting steel plates. A durable replacement for the wooden separators that are being used for centuries.

The parts, a polymer composite material cast in a cylinder shape, have been developed as plate separation during storage and transport.

The polymer composite materials are now used on ships from St. Petersburg  to the harbour of Ghent (BE). These reusable separating parts on the cargo from steel plates will be collected at the  harbour to be transported back to sender. There is a deposit on the parts, a stick behind the door to make sure they are recycled.

For this a new transport scheme is being established by Ruscon,  to allow the use of these reusable separation agents. Also Ruscon takes care of the full customs clearance for the loading and unloading ports and exports the re-import for the seperators to Russia. In this way, the customer receives a complete use cycle of this innovative product,

There the parts are light and easy to handle, the ease of use means also, improvement to the speed of handling when loading and unloading the steel plates.

Since the spring of this year, a test period has started on the St. Petersburg – Ghent (Belgium) – St. Petersburg route. During this period, both traditional materials and the polymeric separators were used for cargo securing. A total of five test shipments were carried out and finally, on June 18, a ship was on its way from St. Petersburg with a cargo completely separated by the polymer components.

A number of large steel producers have shown interest in using the new separating materials. Therefore, in addition to the port of St. Petersburg, a shipment will soon be prepared using these innovative separation technologies from Novorossiysk.

Finally for the figures, approximately 20 m3 of wood is normally used when loading a batch of 5,000 tons of metal. For this load of 5 thousand tons of metal plates, about 50 thousand plastic bottles are needed for the production of the composite components. The separation parts can be reused several times and are themselves recyclable.

And the most important added value is that this polymer composite material saves 13 thousand cubic meters of timber and have a much longer life than that of wood.