Chute’s packages employed at coal handling facilities at mines, energy plants and ports tackle dust problems at their source rather than attempt to control dust after it has been created and dispersed into the atmosphere.

Chute engineer Dennis Pomfret, whose Chute Technology partners experience encompasses Australia, Asia, Africa and the US, said the same technologies could be applied to inlet, hood, chute, spoon, enclosure and saturation zones to address widespread spillage hazards, with their cost, downtime and safety issues.

“Good designs such as these – either new or retrofitted – demonstrate that environmentally sensitive production need not necessarily come at a cost to output,” Pomfret said.

“In fact, these chute improvement technologies have achieved major increases in production, exceeding 50% and even 80% in some cases, while solving waste and spillage problems.”

He said Chute’s packages were unique in that they unified the best proven technologies that address dust and spillage issues and combined them into problem-solving packages that combined integrated advanced product flow analysis; 3D Discrete Element Method design processes; and globally proven manufacturing services.

“The packages – which apply to completely new plants and problem areas within existing plants – deploy technologies whose availability and application may have been too fragmented or unmanageable and put into the too-hard basket,” he added.

“But now the environmental safety and profit waste issues raised by dust and spillage have placed these issues high on the industry agendas worldwide.”