Visit to Coopersoli

Last week I visited Coopersoli, a recycling cooperative in BH. I went with a few other production engineers from UFMG. We are conducting various visits to cooperatives and associations in the area to develop two projects: improve the production process within the warehouses (flow of materials) and the commercialization of the products themselves. Over their years of working with various organizations, Dr. Lima and his students have developed a set of best practices to make warehouse operations more efficient. We will be examining current structures and working to put those practices into effect. Commercialization will deal more with researching the raw material supply chain, figuring out how to add value to products, and doing cost benefit analysis regarding collection, sorting and processing of various materials.

All recycler organizations have their own operational structure, but the basic process normally works as follows:

1. Trucks arrive carrying material, truck is weighed and unloaded (usually by men)
2. Sorters (usually women) sort through the material, the most complex and time consuming process
3. Material is weighed and stored
4. Material is then compressed, packaged and stored again
5. Material is loaded on to truck for delivery

The Coopersoli warehouse was a bit of a mess, and Cinthia (one of the students I work with) told me that she thought the set-up was especially bad. Because of all the various materials coming from different origins and the complex process of sorting, these warehouses always look a bit chaotic. One of the problems with the Coopersoli warehouse, for example, is that there is only one entrance, meaning that the material enters to be sorted and exits to be delivered through the same door, creating lots of confusion. Also, the truck dumps some materials into a silo at another side of the warehouse, where a huge amount of material clogs up, sometimes to the point where the truck cannot even enter into the area again. Here are some pictures:

Sorting Tables

Sorting in the upper part of the silo

Sorting at the counter under the silo

Entrance to upper silo (on left) and warehouse (on right)

Entrance to cooperative - guardhouse and scale to measure truck weight