Problem: Finding a cost-effective way to dispose of spray booth filters without polluting the environment.
Company Name:
The Colonial Furniture Company
Square Footage: 150,000
Location: Freeburg, PA
Total Employees: 70
Product Offering:
High-end cherry and oak furniture |
The Colonial Furniture Company in Freeburg, Penn., wanted to avoid filling its local landfills with used paper filters from its spray finishing operation. Although in Pennsylvania it is permitted to do so, the company did not want to be responsible for environmental damage that could be the result of such dumping.
The company had been incinerating these filters and locking them into drums. This process was costly, however, and in the eyes of Dennis Van, president of the company, it was not a solution.
“We didn’t want to be known as polluters 10 years from now. I couldn’t sleep at night if we had been dumping all along,” he says.
Two years ago, Van read about a product that might help him with the company’s waste problem. “I was reading in the trade press about a product that won a Challengers Award at the 1998 International Woodworking Fair. It was a spray booth filter that can be cleaned and reused. So, we decided to give it a try.”
The filter, manufactured by Resource Recycling, is made of a plastic material that allows the manufacturer to wash it once a week. “There is some cost up front, but I would say it has paid for itself in less than one year,” Van notes. Before the reusable filters were purchased, Colonial was paying $150 per drum for disposal of incinerated paper filters.
“We have tried reusable filters in the past and they have failed miserably,” he adds. “They were made with a medium- to high-density foam. They just didn’t hold up. When you went to clean them, they just shredded. These resource recycling filters are a high strength plastic. They really stand up to the cleaning.”
To clean the filters, the company uses a stiff broom that is available from Resource Recycling. For tougher cleanings, Colonial uses a specially made block. “Resource Recycling makes a plastic block about four inches wide and six inches long and three-fourths inch thick. These blocks have approximately eighteen metal pins, each about two inches long. The pins are all placed into that block to line up with the pattern in the gridwork of the filter. So, when we want to give them a good cleaning, we take that block and run it through. We clean every week with the broom and every other week using the block and taking the filters out and cleaning both sides,” Van says.
The filter does not operate like a typical filter, notes Van. “My description of how these filters work is like air going over the wing of an airplane. It conforms to the shape of the wing. The exhaust going over the design of the filter adheres the lacquer dust right to it. It traps the particles by using air currents instead of just the filter medium.”
A typical day of production might have more than 200 chairs going through the finishing operation. Still, the filters are holding up well. Colonial has been using the filters for more than a year and Van reports they still appear to be brand new.
