The ABC’s Of IBC’s
Saturday, October 4th, 2008This article discuss how and when IBC’s (intermediate bulk containers) originated and how it has developed over the years.
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Nothing ‘Intermediate’ About IBC Success
ATLANTA, Aug 13, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — In the 1968 iconic film “The Graduate” a businessman pulls the young Benjamin Braddock aside and with one word nails a generation, “Plastics.” Eighteen years later a sales representative would say essentially the same thing to a young Kurt Ross, who, unlike Benjamin Braddock, took heed and built a successful company providing a product most of his customers never see. Ross’ company, Grayling Industries, in Alpharetta, Georgia, makes plastic liners for the intermediate bulk container industry, an esoteric but quietly essential part of the supply chain of American manufacturing.
It wasn’t that long ago that if your business needed ingredients of any kind for your end product, your choice was by the box full or by the boxcar full. Then in 1949 the Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC) was created, it seems, simultaneously in Europe, America and Japan. Termed “intermediate” because it was, indeed, in between a box full and a boxcar full. The new package was easier to handle than a boxcar and held a great deal more than a regular box.
Then, in the late 60s, the “Flexible Intermediate Bulk Container” was created. This “FIBC” was made of woven polypropylene; it could hold the same amount or more than a rigid IBC and had the added benefit of being stackable without requiring a pallet. Often called “bulk bags” or totes, these re-usable bags offered great new efficiencies in manufacturing processing as well as in shipping and storage.
Today IBCs and FIBCs are big business and what makes them more than just a box or a bag are the liners that go into them. As more companies use IBCs they are realizing the benefits of utilizing specialty liners for their various applications.
It was this realm of IBCs and FIBCs that caught Kurt Ross’ attention and led Grayling to design special liners for these intermediate bulk containers. They found that by combining the various properties of different types of plastic film, they could offer a liner that would meet more of the stringent barrier protection requirements that customers needed and by shaping the liner to form-fit the IBC, the package would perform much better than an IBC without such a liner. Grayling could make a liner that kept the contents dry, or kept them wet, or kept them from air, or kept them from being affected by light, among other traits, all depending upon the chemical construction of the liner, and the needs of the client. According to Ross, “We found that we are most effective in helping our customers by consulting with them about their entire process and how to make it more efficient, rather than simply making liner bags. As a result, we’ve learned a great deal about a lot of different industries in the last 20 years.”
According to the Cleveland-based Freedonia Research Group, the demand for all flexible bulk packaging is expected to increase 3.4% annually to a $7 billion industry by 2009. Lewis Anderson, executive vice-president of the Minneapolis-based Flexible Intermediate Bulk Container Association (FIBCA) is encouraged by the forecasts. “FIBCs represent one of the highest growth areas in the packaging industry. We’ve found that a lot of end users are getting more comfortable with FIBCs after years of use, realizing that the product represent a strong economical and effective packaging option.”
Many of the bulk bags that were made in the U.S. 10 years ago are now being manufactured in India or China. Globalization has quickly turned the FIBC into a commodity. The same could be said to be true of many liners that go into bulk bags, but Kurt Ross would beg to differ.
Most liners used in Intermediate containers are called “pillow” or “tube” liners because if you blew them up with air they would either look like a large plastic pillow or an oversized tube. These types of liners are always larger than the containers they fit into therefore there is always excess material to deal with, which is wasteful and can also be costly in other ways. The pillow or tube liner frequently needs constant attention during filling to insure that there are no issues. This extra effort can cost in man hours but also, because the container fills more slowly, it reduces productivity and limits capacity. The tube liner must also regularly be monitored during dispensing to insure that the liner doesn’t dispense with the product into the processing equipment, which could cause a shutdown or contamination. Another drawback of the pillow and tube liner is its inherent shapelessness. Material often gets trapped in the folds of the liner and results in a less than full container or, at the other end, trapped product results in a less than completely discharged container.
To alleviate the cumbersome and inexact nature of dealing with pillow and tube liners Grayling designed a form-fitted liner for IBCs and FIBCs. The form fit conforms to the interior shape of the container exactly, requiring less worker involvement and up to 30% more product going into the bulk bag or other container thereby reducing labor, freight and storage costs as well as reducing the environmental impact.
Today many of the FORTUNE 500 use Guardian(TM) liners, the brand name for Grayling’s packaging products, to store and ship everything from polymers to poultry parts, from coffee to asphalt.
In the process Grayling is helping companies go a little more ‘green.’ Grayling showed one international food giant how using form-fitting liners in FIBCs substantially increased the amount of tea that could be packaged in a container. The higher efficiency meant fewer truck trips, which saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in shipping expenses and massively reduced their carbon emissions. “It wasn’t our objective to be ‘green,’” Ross says, “but increasing efficiencies has a lot of positive downstream effects. Our job is to simply find the right solution for our customers to make their supply channel work better for them.”