Three infant formula plants currently under construction throughout New Zealand are employing Clean Room Certification (CRC) in flooring to ensure the highest standards of best practice in safety and hygiene to satisfy the increasing demands of overseas customers.
Sika is supplying factory flooring with Clean Room Certification at three locations where new infant formula plants are being constructed by Ebert Construction. Oceania Dairy in Glenavy, Dairy Goat in Hamilton and Yashili in Pokeno are all being built with Sika industrial flooring systems that meet stringent standards and customer demands.
Recent food scares in the dairy industry have changed the parameters so that now stakeholders require that all aspects of the manufacturing environment ensure the absolute quality and integrity of the end product.
Max Tombleson, market field manager flooring for Sika says that offshore investors and customers are embracing and demanding Clean Room Certification as standard practice and that a recent delegation of Chinese inspectors for Chinese buyers examined a number of infant formula facilities – auditing quality systems, hygiene, buildings, indeed the whole manufacturing environment from a health and safety point of view. “Clean Room Certification is taking on increasing importance,” he says.
Mr Tombleson says that recent projects such as the ones at Glenavy, Hamilton and Pokeno have utilised CRC practices from the beginning as manufacturers require it – making it easier to access the Chinese market with increasing demands for robust and reliable best practices. “They are looking for the highest standards of materials and manufacturing in all aspects of processing,” he says.
“Sika has the advantage,” Mr Tombleson says, “as we have the full range of Clean Room Certified products – sealants, flooring systems and coatings.”
Mr Tombleson says that dairy manufacturing plant specialists Ebert Construction have been great advocates of Clean Room Certifi cation and have recommended it to their clients who have embraced it.
“Ebert Construction has a long history building dairy plants and they are very successful at it,” he says.
Sika has formed an alliance with other international suppliers and international experts in Clean room design – Fraunhofer IPA of Germany – to prepare a formal testing and certification process for materials used in critical manufacturing environments such as those producing infant formula for export.
Approved products are given a CSM (Clean Room Suitable) rating based on the following assessments:
- Ability to be clean and sanitised
- Biological resistance
- Fungi resistance
- Chemical resistance
- Out gassing – volatile emissions and TVOC (Total Volatile Organic Compounds)
- Emissions of hazardous compounds
- Particulate emissions in simulated use conditions.
Sika has a wide range of floor and wall finishes that come with the CSM certification and their Clean Room Certified materials assessed by Fraunhofer IPA of Germany are more rigorously scrutinised than local clean room standards, which just look at the appearance of a material. The Fraunhofer IPA testing regime is extremely thorough and is designed to ensure the environment is safe and no undesirable chemical or material is released into the product or manufacturing environment.
Photo:Oceania Dairy infant formula plant in Glenavy under construction.
