Concetti, Perugia, Italy, has supplied a fully automatic bagging system to Cheetham Salt, Australia’s largest producer and refiner of solar salt. This type of salt is produced by harvesting the product from coastal or inland lakes using a natural evaporative process. 

 

Cheetham’s requirements were not straightforward and covered both wet salt and dry refined grades with bags in 10, 15, 20 and 25kg sizes as well as different bag types including paper with inner PE liner, woven PP, coated or with PE liner and PE bags both pre-made and from a tubular reel.  A choice of closures was also needed with simple sewing, sewing with fold-over and either of these combined with heat sealing – or for PE bags, heat-sealing only. For many suppliers such a combination of products, pack sizes, types and closures would have represented a major challenge, but Concetti was able to meet all of Cheetham’s specific needs, including being able to change the complete packaging line from one operating program to another in less than 90 seconds. Output is 750-1150 bags/h depending on product and bag weight.

 

A further complication was that both floor space and headroom in the existing portal framed warehouse was restricted, but Concetti was able to engineer an extremely compact arrangement that included a bag placing/filling machine with reel feed option plus checkweigher, metal detector, palletizer and stretch-hooder. The heart of the system is the Concetti Starpack 1600 bag filling and closing machine. www.concetti.com 

 

 

The Concetti Starpack 1600 can fill 750-1150 bags per hour, depending on the product and bag weight; there is a wide choice of packaging sizes and materials, including PE bags supplied on a tubular roll (below)