Issue link: http://palletcentral.uberflip.com/i/1301695
18 PalletCentral • September-October 2020 palletcentral.com manufacture and reprocessing of lumber products and packaging, both locations can assemble state- of-the-art pallets, crates and other wooden products compatible with all ISPM 15 standards, guaranteeing quality wood products that can be shipped confidently and safely around the world. Pioneering Persistence for Robotic Automation The proven established process for the disassembly of wooden pallets (ranging from standard 48" x 40" GMA pallets to other various sizes) for lumber reclamation entailed one to two skilled workers per station utilizing bandsaws. Between the Tuscumbia and Nashville plant locations, there were a total of seven stations, where the dangerous, deafening and draining manual process for dismantling pallets took place. Over time, this noisy and labor-intensive process made it difficult for McVantage Packaging to retain manual workers to meet year-round production demands, making the existing production process unreliable. With plans already in place to retool the Tuscumbia, Alabama facility in 2015, Joe McKinney, McVantage managing director and son of C.L. McKinney, decided the timing was right to revive the McKinney pioneering ways, and he eagerly sought robotic automation for the application of wooden pallet disassembly. With nearly two billion wooden pallets in circulation in the United States 1 , with the majority of them being replaced each year to maintain the nation's supply chain 2 , the need for a reliable robotic dismantling process in line with environmental stewardship goals was well overdue. The technology McVantage Packaging needed on the shop floor, however, remained undeveloped, motivating the McVantage team to formulate a plan for the first-of-its-kind robotic bandsaw for the disassembly of wooden pallets. With pioneering persistence, Joe and other decision makers presented Equipped with an efficient six-axis Yaskawa Motoman® MH225 robot, McVantage Group's robotic bandsaw for the disassembly of wooden pallets provides the reliability needed to maintain consistent production while increasing yield and decreasing waste. McVantage Group 1 Pallet Statistics: Pallet Sizes Becoming More Standardized in the U.S. Market, PackagingRevolution.net, 2018 2 Wooden Pallets Cost Us More Than You Know!, Circular Supply Chains Inc., 2018