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Re-think pallet securing

Key drivers for sustainable production and consumption are the underlying supply chains and the handling of goods. Work together with KION and develop smart and sustainable solutions for more environmentally friendly, automated and efficient securing of goods on pallets – as they are one of the key transport carriers of our time.

To support you in your idea and team generation process, you have the opportunity to participate in one of our digital Design Thinking Workshop - register here or find more information here.

 

  • ✅ Challenge completed
  • 🏁 Winner
    Congrats to SciAutomations!
  • 🏆  Rewards
    20,000 € prize pool prize pool in the Innovate2030 project + joint publication with all stakeholders + chance for further cooperation with KION
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This use case is part of the Innovate2030 Challenge

Status Quo

78 million tons – this is the amount of plastic packaging circulating worldwide every year according to the WWF. A third of it ends up uncontrolled in the environment as garbage. To tackle this problem, the entire logistics chain (i.e. underlying processes, transport routes, transport carriers, packaging methods) has to be analyzed and unsustainable and harmful procedures identified.

One central process in need for optimization is the securing and protection of goods on pallets in more and more automated material flow systems.
Usually pallets are secured using plastic stretch wrap or shrink wrap
to ensure stability and safety for transportation. The wrapping also protects the goods from water and dirt. Secure wrapping is a mandatory requirement in the supply chain.

Today, a lot more than 500 million pallets are used for the transportation of goods worldwide. Therefore, new wrapping solutions can have a great positive impact on the environment and in achieving the aim to reduce plastic.

In addition to the non-environmentally friendly materials of the standard plastic wrap the manual wrapping and unwrapping are physically tough and time consuming. While plastic stretch wrap can already be applied automatically, unpacking is still mainly a manual task. This is due to the complexity of unwrapping the tightly applied plastic film and the characteristics of the products stored on the pallet.

The increased lead times slow down processes in the logistics supply chain. Therefore, the need for a fully automated packaging solution grows

Key question

The aim, and therefore, the two key questions for this use case are the following:

  • How can we come up with sustainable, safe and efficient pallet securing solutions that have at least the same performance and usability of the current stretch wrapping without significantly impacting the weight and dimensions of a pallet?
  • How can this solution fit into automated material flow systems, so that securing and unsecuring of goods on pallets can be fully automated based on the EPAL pallet standard

Potential impact

  • Reduction of plastic waste 
  • Increase efficiency and thereby optimize the ecological footprint
  • Increase operator´s health and safety

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