Galloo Ghent outfitted with two E-Cranes

No less than 15,000 to 20,000 tons of scrap pass through the Gallo Recycling Group terminal in Ghent, Belgium, daily, with the help of Belgian company E-Crane.

In November 2009, the first E-Crane was installed at Galloo Recycling Group in Ghent, greatly increasing the handling capacity at the export terminal, according to E-Crane.

Toward the end of 2012, E-Crane received an order for a second E-Crane at the Galloo Ghent site. Galloo Recycling Group again chose a type 2000-series crane. The acquisition of the second E-Crane resulted in further time savings, the company says. The flexibility of the E-Crane® means that the scrap can be deposited neatly in 25-meter-high (82-foot-high) mounds. This means that when a handymax ship moors at the Galloo Recycling Group’s wharf in Ghent, loading can begin immediately and can take less than 48 hours, according to E-Crane.

“With our old cable cranes we couldn’t get into the corners of the holds, which made loading and unloading problematic,” explains Galloo Recycling Group CEO Rik Debaere. “With the E-Crane, the scrap can be spread out better, and we have to do less trimming, which, of course, saves a lot of time.
“We had to stick to our guns to convince the local management to purchase another E-Crane,” Debaere adds.

“I promised a time saving of 25 percent; I was therefore delighted to discover that we could actually load 50 percent faster than with the old hire cranes,” he continues.

Ghent transloads the most scrap in Belgium. Five years ago, when Galloo says it was the only scrap exporter in the Port of Ghent, 700,000 tons of scrap was handled annually. Of the 1.5 million tons of scrap coming through the port of Ghent currently, 850,000 tons are handled by Galloo.

At Galloo Recycling Group, the two Type 2000-series E-Crane’s discharge about three vessels per week, E-Crane reports. Once a month, the two giant cranes work in tandem to load a deep-sea vessel. In total, Galloo Recycling Group operates eight cranes. One of the machines, built in 2003 and used to fill the scrap shears, has some 48,000 hours on the meter and is still running well, according to E-Crane. The oldest of the E-Cranes used by the Galloo Recycling Group is in operation at the site of the headquarters in Menen. That unit has been used for 25 years to load scrap into the scrap shredder.

“Our strength is that we have evolved organically, very gradually and carefully, without growing pains,” says E-Crane Managing Director Lieven Bauwens. “Our success is based on three fundamentals: flexibility, concerted specialization and the fact that we are at the top of a niche market. It is nice to think that we have achieved it all with Flemish know-how.”

In 2012 E-Crane took over the Polish steel construction company Famaba. Since then, the steel construction of the cranes has been carried out in-house.

“During the last two years, we have been optimizing our warehouse in Adegem. This has even lead to a new entity: E-Crane Parts & Services,” says Managing Director Lieven Bauwens. “With our new warehouse platform, we can optimize our after-sales service, and we have access worldwide to the necessary parts. Furthermore, E-Crane Parts & Services is regulated by a software program that we developed ourselves.”

E-Crane says it also has a new training center. “Our E-Crane Academy allows us to teach new colleagues the tricks of the trade, to keep our people up to date with the latest knowledge and to organize courses for our clients,” Bauwens adds.