Foreign material: plastic conveyors

Hi Everyone

i recieved a customer complaint recently about a conveyor plastic piece that was found in a burger. how would i prevent this sort of thing from reoccuring? conveyors do break from time to time control of such incedences is difficult. my preventative action was to replace the plastic conveyor with a metal conveyor so in the event of breakage our metal detectors would be able to pick it up. but not call conveyors in our facility can be replaced to the metal ones. does anyone have a better solution?

Sheetal

Wow! Sounds all to familiar. We too have had issues with pieces of plastic being found in the finished product. We also cannot change out the belts for production purposes. What we have recently recommended to our customers is that we will increase the inspections of the production line in hopes to catch issue before it occurs. Basically we went from a weekly inspection of the plastic belts and side guards to daily inspection. Now this is only for a specific part of the production flow where the plastic most likely occurs. If we were to do it for the entire line we would be down for hours just doing inspections.

In short I would start by looking at PM inspection times and see if you can improve there.

Jim

Dear Sheetal,

You don't give much info regarding process (eg -40degC ) so hv to generalise.
No practical experience of this technique and I think most threads/info here are similarly pessimistic but X-ray is supposed to have more chance for dense plastic for obvious reasons. (but not white I presume?).

A simple suggested test for any chance is -

Q Is there a simple test?
A Drop the contaminant into a glass of water. If it floats, it will not be detectable in most products. If the object sinks it may be detectable. Of course this is just a generalization,as detectability depends on the relative density of the contaminant compared to the product, as well as other characteristics such as thickness and homogeneity.
http://www.onguardin...n.com/FAQs.html

Regardless, the last 2 paragraphs of this link sort of spell out the problem i guess -
http://niba.endofnig...-modular-belts/

Rgds / Charles.C

BTW, welcome to the forum!

thank you for your response and thank you for having me

Hello sheetal,

it is always good to ensure that you check youe conveyors on a weekly basis, similar to having a glass register except that you are monitoring the state of the conveyors and if they look in a bad way then you can address it as an Internal corrective action. After all HACCP is all about prevention and eliminating or reducing the hazard so that it is under control.

Cheers

Yep I agree. Start up checks and a weekly inspection of conveyors, also purchase them in a distinctive colour so they are easily picked up if there is an issue.