Our Pinkenba cement grinding and bagging facility on the Brisbane River has been in operation since 2009, producing General Purpose and blended cements for customers across Queensland and NSW. The plant runs two grinding mills with a combined annual capacity of 1.3 million tonnes and holds ISO 9001 certification with a NATA-accredited laboratory on site.
To ensure a more reliable output of our 20kg bags — supplied to hardware stores, landscape yards and small batch plants — we replaced Pinkenba’s existing manual bagging process with an automated system.
With demand for our cement growing, the manual bagging line was handling increasing volume, resulting in higher product giveaway due to overfill, greater operator dust exposure and a labour requirement that was becoming harder to scale efficiently.
Replacing the manual spouts and spillage equipment with a new Haver & Boecker automated bagging machine meant solving two problems simultaneously.
The new machine had to be designed to hit a target fill rate of 550–600 bags per hour – a specification that required multiple iterations of bag design to achieve.
And with the plant’s only bagging capacity going offline during installation, the new machine had to be operational within three weeks to avoid disruption to customer supply.
This project represented a major step forward in efficiency, safety and product quality at Pinkenba. It was delivered across eight months, involved four specialist suppliers working collaboratively and included a set of upgrades across the broader operation.
This project included:
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