Conti’s SC20 Clean – the Big Cheese at FrieslandCampina

If you’ll indulge, we’d like to talk about cheese for a moment – but bear with us, there is method behind our digression into the world of delicious dairy products…Dutch cheese is, as you are well aware, famous throughout the world. FrieslandCampina Cheese alone makes 1,000 tons of this dairy product every week in the village of Gerkesklooster. In all, the company operates twelve cheese factories in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, utilising 1,400 forklifts to store and load its products.

Every day 1.5 million litres of milk are delivered to the factory in Gerkesklooster, with two-thirds of this used in cheese making. The process of turning this milk into cheese wheels weighing some 15 to 18 kilograms takes approximately 14 days. Of the 1,000 tons of cheese produced each week, around 800 tons remain in Europe. The cheese wheels are shipped to various locations where the ripening process is carried out; this lasts anything from a few days to several months.

Production at the Gerkesklooster factory is carried out 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and each of the forklifts in operation there clocks up an annual total of 1,000 working hours. They are fitted with the Continental SC20 Clean industrial tyre, which enables operation without marking floor surfaces. Loads of up to seven tons have to be moved by the forklifts and lifted to a maximum height of up to three metres, exerting enormous leverage forces on the tyres in the process. However Continental points out that the design of the SC20 Clean solid tyre offers outstanding resistance to tilting. A further benefit the tyre offers the foodstuffs manufacturer is that it contains no nitrosamines or highly aromatic oils – both of which are suspected of being carcinogenic.

A further positive characteristic of the SC20 Clean that Continental promotes is driver comfort. Although there is no air to cushion any inevitable impacts, Conti reports this solid tyre is comfortable to drive. Olne Loonestra, a forklift driver at the FrieslandCampina factory in Gerkesklooster, states: “I’m highly satisfied with the driving characteristics of the SC20; the tyre is not too hard.” Lammert A. Salverda, warehouse and packaging manager, is pleased for other reasons: “The low rolling resistance saves on energy and, together with the very thick tread rubber, this makes our costs per operating hour for the SC20 low, so we achieve very high economic efficiency.”