| Résumé : |
The modern, wet blue processing factory of Michell Ireland was opened by the parent Australian compagny G.H. Michell and Sons in 1993 near Portlaw, Country Waterford. It was designed to accept 6,000 fresh hides a week from abattoirs within a 150-mile radius of the plant. The sucess of the enterprise has meant that capacity been steadlily increased, and the plant can now process 10-11,000 hides per week, which represents about 25% of the total Irish kill. As the skill base of the Irish leather industry is quite small, the tannery has had to look worldwide for its employees, and the 80-strong workforce now also includes operators and technicians from the Czech Republic, Brazil and Romania.
Although the output of the plant has been substantially increased since its opening, the emphasis in recent years has been on the quality of the wet blue produced. Most of the hides are destined for automotive and furniture upholstery where quality expectation is high, and the plant is approved ti ISO 9002. Anthony Sheehan, Michell Ireland's trading manager, belives that the emphasis on freshly killed hides, put into controlled preservation in the shortest possible time, gives a major advantage in maximising grain quality. The company has invested 1 million euros in automated handling in the last six months, and a major proportion of this has been in fresh hide reception, grading and preservation using the lastest "liquid ice" technology from the Italian automated handling specialist Feltre.
The original hide reception system at the plant was based around the arrival of truckloads of fresh hides arriving from the abattoirs in the evening following the day's kill. Tipper trucks backed up to a large external door, then tipped their load of hides onto a lower level concrete floor inside the factory. Operators climbed the heap to work amongst the hides, separating and dragging out individual hides to place on an overhead conveyor with hooks on chains. A cut was made in the hide to accept the hook, and the hide carried along for weighing, trimming and grading, before being put into plastic boxes. Cubed ice from an ice-making machine was shovelled in between the hides, and the boxes moved to a chilled store room until delivery to the liming vessels. The system was labour intensive, and involved hard, physical labour for the workers. |
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New liquid-ice raw hide preservation in Ireland in WORLD LEATHER, Vol. 15, N° 5 (08-09/2002)
