Case Story / Swedish paint shop

Environmental and financial sustainability at Swedish paint shop

www.toyota-forklifts.eu

Toyota Material Handling’s automated paint shop reduces energy consumption and waste and eliminates volatile organic compound in the Mjölby factory, one of the largest forklift production facilities in the world.

Environment / Energy

Productivity challengeThe Mjölby plant is the cradle of the world famous BT forklifts – a Swedish export gem, praised globally for its quality, safety and efficiency. They distinguish them-selves visually by wearing what we call “the Toyota or-ange colour”.

In 2005, the Toyota management needed a change to increase capacity in the Mjölby factory, Sweden. “We set a target to go from 45,000 units to at least 70,000 annual-ly”, Marcus Johansson, Production Development Project Manager at BT Products AB remembers. “In the old paint shop, we used to send in units with 6.1 minute intervals. Today, we do so every 1.8 minutes”.

The solution came with the all-new, highly automated paint shop. The only manual work remaining is hanging the parts on an elevated conveyor belt. Then they start an automated journey, going through washing, pretreat-ment, drying, robot painting, hardening and cooling, be-fore they are finally taken down from the conveyor and sent to the assembly line. The workflow is managed by an advanced computer system, which controls every step and the temperature.

“The visitors of our new paint shop are often struck by two things: cleanliness and the robots who do the ac-tual painting”, says Marcus Johansson. “The forklift parts travel, switching tracks, floors and wait in line. We super-vise that everything works like a charm”.

Zero drainage, reduced CO2

The new paint shop in Mjölby is undoubtedly a fascinat-ing piece of engineering that duly fulfils significant fi-nancial and productive goals. But it is equally a highly sustainable way of painting. Agneta Ring, Environmental Manager at BT Products AB, guide us through its eco-logical benefits.

“We invested massively in this paint shop. But we also knew that we could draw clear environmental profit from it as well. Improving the working environment for our employees was on our agenda, but we also wanted to reduce overall environmental impact”. With this commit-ment in mind, the project team set new targets – including zero drainage, reduced paint powder waste and energy consumption, and a massive reduction in CO2 emissions, by switching from LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) to dis-trict heating.

The environmental performance has been optimised at every step of the painting process. One of the largest gains has been recorded in the washing station, where dirt and oily residues are cleaned off from the steel plates. In the old paint shop, the washing water was heated us-ing LPG. Today, the water is heated by district heating from the municipality network.

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303Paint shop project team members Agneta Ring and Marcus Johansson TPS Pull System in practice: Different parts on the same conveyor belt

This has led to a CO2 decrease of a full 340 tons an-nually. The washing water is also filtered and distilled; it passes through carbon filters and ion switches before it is finally treated with UV-light to remove any possible bacteria. Then, the water is ready to be used again. No drop is wasted.

“It was a truly remarkable day when we, as an act of symbol, could cut off the drain pipe leading to the public sewer,” says Agneta.

Financial and environmental sustainabilityWhen the parts have dried, they are transported to a paint box, where industrial robots do all the work. The colour is powder-based and solvent-free. The paint powder is electrically charged with 100,000 volts before it’s sprayed on the metal and statically attracted to the surface. When the colour coating has reached the established thick-ness, it isolates the metal. All superfluous paint powder falls through a mesh floor decking and is vacuumed back for reuse.

”This is a perfect example of how financial and environ-mental sustainability go hand in hand with working envi-ronment improvements,” says Marcus Johansson. ”To-day, we have a totally solvent free working place. We don’t let coloured powder out at all and we have man-aged to increase the paint powder reuse ratio from 67% to 86%. This means financial savings worth 75,000 euro annually.”

Toyota Production SystemThis paint shop corresponds to Toyota’s vision and core principles. One of them is Kaizen – translating as “contin-uous improvement”. Early in 2009, we switched to paint-ing kits instead of component batches. Today, all parts of the truck arrive at the assembly line simultaneously. Before, we used batches of 20 identical components. This evolution is totally in line with the Toyota Production System (TPS), where the delivery is done just-in-time.

Integrated in the Kaizen is Poka-Yoke* - a working be-haviour that helps to identify and reduce potential errors and downtime. Thanks to camera surveillance, the sys-tem now ‘sees’ if the components hang correctly before entering the paint boxes. This method helps to avoid robots colliding with misplaced components, minimising equipment damage leading to financial savings worth 50,000 euro annually. Today there is an intensive ongo-ing Kaizen project related to the energy consumption re-duction in the hardening process. Investing and testing new technologies are essential at Toyota.

”To preserve the environment, we follow the Toyota Group’s guidelines and directives”, says Agneta Ring. ”One of our cornerstone pillars in our sustainability ef-forts is the 3R-principle: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This paint shop is a great example of our good practices that support healthy finances and a safe working place while also reducing environmental impact.”

* Poka-Yoke is a Japanese term that translates roughly as “mistake proofing”