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Breakthrough in gas cylinder recycling
also provides a "children in need" stocking filler
December 2002 — A ground-breaking scheme used
at Air Products' Bardon plant in Leicestershire to recycle
industrial cylinders has not only won its staff a company
award, but also provided a £1,000 Christmas stocking-filler
for the BBC's Children in Need Appeal.
The environmental payback of the scheme will save landfill
space to the equivalent of ten London buses.
Abandonment and disposal of industrial cylinders has become
a huge environmental problem, and as a result of using a
programme to tackle the issue the Bardon team won the Air
Products' global 2002 environmental, health and safety award
for the "re-massing" of dissolved acetylene (D/A)
cylinders.
They competed with Air Products colleagues at sites in
30 other countries to win the award, and the staff have
decided to donate the prize money to the BBC appeal via
Radio Leicester.
So, as well as reducing landfill, the Bardon programme
also reduces the cylinder weight by 6% (5kg), which leads
to safer manual handling. This has a knock-on potential
saving to the company of about £200,000.
When Air Products bought the Bardon plant in 1999 they
inherited a disposal programme involving some 12,000 cylinders.
This involved stripping the acetone mass from the cylinders,
and then disposing of the cylinder itself. This cost the
company £28.75 per cylinder as well as consigning
the cylinder to a registered landfill site.
Furthermore, D/A cylinders were becoming a rare asset,
with a replacement cost of £87 each, and the shortage
had a knock-on impact on customers who could not get supplies.
Before the re-cycling programme was introduced, 6,000 cylinders
had been scrapped at a cost of about £172,500, and
the company would have had to spend an additional £504,000
on replacement cylinders.
The savings kicked in when the Bardon team discovered that
these particular cylinders could be "re-massed"
with a lighter material at a cost of £84 per cylinder.
This enables the cylinder to be re-used and filled on a
faster (Simplio) system.
The outcome is that the company has scrapped its "scrapping"
programme.
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