Cosmetics and Personal Care Manufacturers Achieve Significant Savings by Using Pigging Systems
Due to the cost of raw materials used in the formulation of skincare products and makeup, cosmetics and personal care manufacturers want to make sure they use everything they buy and avoid throwing high-valued ingredients down the drain.
After all, what manufacturer wants to waste product, especially if it’s saleable, expensive to manufacture and in perfectly good condition?
That’s why it is increasingly important for cosmetics and personal care manufacturers to recover as much product as possible, rather than letting it go to waste.
One of the best ways to recover product, increase yields and reduce waste in cosmetics and personal care processing is to use liquid product recovery (pigging) technology.
Recovering Residual Mass in Pipes With an HPS Pigging System
Pipeline pigging is in wide use in cosmetics and personal care processing and production, as well as sanitary and hygienic applications such as food, beverages, confectionery and homecare to name a few.
The technology is one of the most effective ways to recover residual mass in pipes, reduce waste, minimise water use, speed up changeovers and improve efficiency. And that’s only a few of the benefits of pigging!
From creams, lotions, and ointments to shampoo, conditioner, and moisturiser to foundation, deodorants, lipstick and perfume, HPS pipeline pigging solutions deliver rapid payback and ongoing return on investment (ROI).
Multiple Batches, Shorter Production Runs and More Frequent Changeovers in Cosmetics and Personal Care Processing
Cosmetics and personal care manufacturers process a wide range of products of varying viscosities, from face cream, and body butters to foundation and sunscreen. Due to the proliferation of products, manufacturers must contend with multiple batches, shorter production runs, and more frequent changeovers.
It’s important that pipework and other equipment is cleared of one product before it can handle the next one for both hygiene and sanitation reasons.
When changing from one batch to another, there will always be product remaining in the pipeline from the previous run. That’s because some of the product residue will cling to the pipeline walls or remain in other areas of the pipelines.
If this product isn’t removed, it will contaminate the next product. More importantly, this product is perfectly good and useable, so if it’s flushed away, it’s valuable product that’s wasted. At the same time, throwing away perfectly good product is bad for the environment and costly for cosmetics and personal care manufacturers.
The High Cost of Waste in Cosmetics and Personal Care Processing
Without a pigging process, the pipeline would typically be flushed using large amounts of water as well as cleaning chemical agents to push out the product to drain and clear the pipeline for the next batch.
Not only does this take time, labour and uses large amounts of water, cleaning agents, energy, and resources, it results in the liquid that remains in the pipe being flushed to waste.
The resulting wastewater and cleaning agents also need to be treated responsibly due to the environmental impact. Many ingredients used in cosmetics and personal care products can cause severe damage if they enter water systems in high concentrations.
So, cosmetics and personal care manufacturers must incur high costs for safe disposal and waste treatment.
Recovering High-Cost Ingredients with Product Recovery Technology
Manufacturers that process cosmetics and personal care products can achieve significant gains from product recovery, waste reduction, and the faster cleaning provided by pigging solutions from HPS.
Pigging uses a specialist projectile (the ‘pig’) to recover residual product from pipelines. If it wasn’t for pigging, this product would otherwise be discarded as waste during the clean in place (CIP)/cleaning process.
The HPS pipeline pig is extremely efficient and has a cylindrical style shape with no fins, caps or assembled pieces. This enables it to have full body contact with the pipeline walls, even around 1.5 D bends and typically recover up to 99.5% of residual mass within full transfer pipelines. In this way, pigging increases yields significantly.
How Does Pipeline Pigging Work?
The pigging process introduces the pig into the pipeline (usually automatically) and pushes it through the pipe under pressure. Compressed air, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, clean water or even the next product (depending on the application) provide the pressure.
Because the pig fits so tightly in the pipeline, it pushes practically all the residual product out of the pipeline to its destination. The destination refers to the filler or tank, packaging, or the liquid could be sent to continue processing along with the rest of the product.
So, instead of sending this residual product to waste, it is saved. Therefore, for cosmetics and personal care processors with a lot of product transfer pipelines and high-valued ingredients, there’s a lot for them to gain from pigging. Here’s how to find out how much a pigging system can save you.
Pigging Speeds up CIP, Reduces Waste, Minimises Water and Effluent in Cosmetics and Personal Care Production
Because pigging recovers so much product from the pipelines, there’s much less cleaning and rinsing required. So, there’s less work for a CIP system to do. Typically, the CIP process uses large amounts of chemicals, detergents or sterilising fluids as part of the cleaning procedure.
However, incorporating pipeline pigging before CIP enables manufacturers to decrease the amount of cleaning agents, save money, reduce effluent and minimise the amount of rinse water. In this way, the environmental benefits of pigging are significant.
Other key benefits of pigging are that it significantly improves efficiency and boosts productivity. This is through increased yields, minimised waste, quicker changeovers, reduced flushing, and chemical washouts and increased capacity. This equates to higher profits.
Contact HPS
Process cosmetics and personal care products and aren’t pigging? Then there’s a high chance you’re wasting valuable product, time, resources, and money. As well as spending far too much time and money on inefficient changeovers and waste disposal.
So, get started with pigging today and contact the world’s leading specialists. Since 1995, HPS has been delivering reliable, innovative and effective product recovery and pigging solutions to organisations throughout the world.