Manufacturing
From the assembly line to the front office, manufacturing facilities need a range of floor cleaning equipment to keep the environment productive and meet health and safety requirements. Tennant offers everything from scrubbers and sweepers to extractors and burnishers, designed for every kind of industry.
We understand your need for fast, professional floor cleaning, and for that work to fit around your plant's core processes rather than interrupt them. That is exactly what Tennant machines are built for: efficient floor cleaning with those realities in mind. Our equipment is also easy to operate, simple to maintain and highly reliable.
Success story: Wells Concrete
Wells Concrete operates an industrial plant specialising in the design, manufacture and installation of structural and architectural precast panels. Inside its warehouse of roughly 18,000 square metres, it works with a range of minerals, concrete among them.
Challenge
Silica, a natural mineral present in construction materials such as concrete, rock and sand, is a hidden hazard on job sites. The risks of respirable crystalline silica dust, generated when products are cut, ground or drilled, are significant. The American Lung Association warns that prolonged exposure to these microscopic silica particles can scar the lungs and compromise breathing capacity.
Solution
The key to preventing silica exposure lies in keeping silica dust out of the air, a difficult task in a large manufacturing plant. Traditional methods such as push-broom sweeping prove inefficient and ineffective. As Ben Dalsing, plant engineer at Wells Concrete, puts it, sweeping the plant with a broom would be like cleaning a house with a toothbrush.
The regulations led the Wells team to look for a solution, and they found the answer at Tennant. Tennant offers a range of dust-control methods that meet regulatory requirements, and the team chose dry cleaning with filtration as the ideal solution. The Tennant S30 industrial sweeper — versatile, rugged, and fitted with a three-stage primary filter system plus an optional fourth-stage HEPA filter — proved its effectiveness over more than 60 days of testing, collecting over 9 tonnes of dust and debris. Remarkably, the HEPA filter accumulated barely a pound and a half of residue in that period, suggesting a service life of up to a year depending on the customer's application.
Results
The results speak for themselves. Mike Frieler, Safety Manager at Wells, points to a clear improvement with the new cleaning system. The Tennant S30 sweeper is not only more efficient than a traditional broom and dustpan, it also traps dust in its filters, keeping it out of the air and out of workers' lungs. On top of improving worker health, the Tennant sweeper is more efficient, doing in minutes what used to take hours with a broom. That frees workers for more productive tasks.
Ultimately, Wells Concrete demonstrates its commitment to employee safety by investing in innovative, efficient solutions. In the words of Safety Manager Frieler, "as a company, we invest in our employees; if we do not take care of our employees, we will not have a company".
