Member Article

Cardboard box manufacturer invests in Riverside compactor

Greyhound Box Ltd has invested in a waste compactor from Riverside Waste Machinery, as the packaging company prepares for 5% growth over the next 12 months.

Safely installed during UK lockdown, the RWM compactor – with 1100 litre bin lifter and a number of wheelie bins – has been a crucial next step in the firm’s plans for the future.

Established in 1991, the Yorkshire-headquartered Greyhound Box team has spent the last five years improving its on-site materials handling efficiencies, and the latest addition to its machinery range has further solidified this process – not least due to its impressive speed of operation.

Despite the devastating effects of COVID-19 across the globe, increased demand for packaging – to house much-needed supplies of items including hand sanitiser and PPE – means business at the Leeds-based factory has ramped up.

Louise O’Brien, managing director at Greyhound, said: “We’d outgrown our old baler, and it no longer fitted our needs – it became clear that we were using excessive staff hours to operate and maintain it. So, in line with our outlook on saving time and money as a business, we began to explore alternatives.”

The team therefore sought out a faster solution, and contacted Jonathan Oldfield at Harrogate-based Riverside Waste Machinery, due to an existing relationship with the firm. Discussing the investment, Jonathan commented: “When we installed the RWM 400 waste baler back in 2005, Greyhound Box created far less waste. Now, in-house production levels have continued to rise – and as a result, the compactor was an obvious choice.”

Greyhound Box – which is IS0 14000 certified – was also supplied with eight 1100 litre wheelie bins, enabling ease of movement of the cardboard.

Typically larger than a vertical baler, compactors have a greater waste handling capacity, with the newly-installed model able to process 345kg of materials daily, in a fraction of the time.

Louise added: “A member of staff would spend three hours a day baling cardboard in the factory – sometimes even a full day if there was a backlog of material. This would greatly affect production as staff were lost to the process.

“Now, with the compactor in place, we use up less than two and a half hours a week loading the machine – it has made a real difference in terms of time savings!”

Based in Harrogate, Riverside Waste Machinery has operated since 1997 and provides a range of waste balers, compactors and consumables to companies across the UK.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Katie Mallinson .