The packaging of glass bottles and jars has been optimised with the introduction of Smartpads and the Smartframe.
Pallets were built using cardboard inverted layer
trays and a polythene shroud. These pallets were
usually around 1.3m high. The materials are costly;
application is energy and time consuming and not
environmentally friendly. At the filling site removal
of the packaging is difficult and time consuming causing
health and safety concerns. This packaging method is
unable to keep up with high speed lines.
Major breweries who wanted to run their line at 1000+ b.p.m. invested in tall depalletisers and requested glass manufacturers produce pallets of 2.4m high. This was done with flat plastic layer pads and a shroud, the removal of the shroud was problematic for health and safety reasons, and was costly. Transporting these pallets was difficult with many collapsed pallets.
The next stage was to horizontally band layers and vertically band the pallets, eliminating the shroud. Again this caused issues as operators needed to reach up 2.4m to remove the top band. The bands often fell to the bottom of the bottle making them ineffective. Up to 3% of all loads had one or more collapsed pallets. Glass companies often applied a shroud to pallets and removed it close to the filling site to aid stability.
The development of the Loadhog Smartpad and Smartframe gives glass companies and fillers a cost effective, environmentally friendly, simpler choice which delivers the safest method of transporting glass.
The pallets now have a live spring loaded plastic top frame and only vertical bands. Due to the wave profile at the edge of the plastic layer pads the need for horizontal banding is eliminated. This can add up to 2% in glass manufacturers’ line efficiency due to hold ups on the horizontal banding system being commonplace. Bottle losses are reduced and pallet stability optimised.
Bottling sites have the advantage of no horizontal bands
or shrouds to remove and as the profiled plastic layer pad
holds the bottles in, 
far fewer bottles drop on the infeed to
depalletisers,
improving bottle loss figures and health
and safety.
This improvement in stability, delivery performance and confidence has lead to additional layer(s) of glass being applied to pallets, reducing transport costs, glass loss, customer dissatisfaction and potential line downtime, improved health and safety, reducing the unit cost and environmental impacts, reduced fork lift truck movements and fewer deliveries also benefit both the glass producer and filler.
Smartstak plastic layer pads and spring loaded top frame has shown to be the safest, most cost effective method of packing glass and transporting tall pack pallets for both the glass producer and the glass filler.
