Diacon has been providing bespoke designs and seamless integration of their conveyor guarding system for over 15 years, providing lightweight, corrosion-free alternatives to traditional steel guards. Now the company is stepping things up with a fully recycled guard in development.

We spoke to Brendan Refalo, Diacon’s Managing Director, about the Diacon System, their custom guarding configurations for both existing and new conveyors, the huge cost savings they can bring to their clients, and their new high-performing recycled guards.

The Diacon system is something that we've manufactured and developed for more than 20 years, thanks to requests from clients to have something better than a standard steel guard on their conveyor belts. It’s a three-part system; they wanted conveyor guards that are corrosion free, lightweight, that really never need to be painted, and are more user friendly. The second part is that we designed and build brackets to fit to their conveyor. The third element of the system is the conveyor hungry board, which is probably paramount to the design because it stops spillage off the conveyor belts and reduces the risk of debris building up on catwalks and causing slips and trips for the operators.

When we integrate into existing structures, we laser scan the existing structure and develop a 3D model to produce bespoke bracketry. Even our guards themselves, while they look very similar from one conveyor to another, are individually designed to suit the requirements of that conveyor. Everything has different dimensions, but we're able to configure a way of adapting our design to any conveyor out there.

It's a much nicer process because you get involved from the ground floor, which reduces a lot of the need for bracketry because we can work with them to design their structure to accommodate our guards from the outset.

This is really worth stating. If a customer is building a brand-new conveyor and they involve us early in the design versus leaving it to the end and retrofitting guards, we can save them about 30% of the cost of the guarding system. If we can get involved at that early stage, they will make big savings.

More often than not, the engineers designing and building the conveyor are forced to leave guarding until the end of the project and then struggle to design them to meet current compliance standards. If given the opportunity to consider guarding at the front end as an integral part of the design, then there's money to be saved.

Once their 3D models are generated, we can start to position guarding and provide workarounds where they're potentially putting cable trays or fire suppression systems, rather than have to tack it on over the top of something later.

All of the benefits and design features of our product have come from many years of discussion, feedback, and changing needs of our customers. We always come out better for it because the product has evolved in the right direction based on really honest feedback back from clients.  

Because of that, we've got design variations that suit some people more than others. We're flexible enough in our design to support any customer's needs, because everybody has different requirements. I think that's a big strength of ours.  

For example, we have lightweight, heavy-duty, high visibility, and standard perforated versions. The standard perforated version is more cost effective, and meets about 70% of the market's needs, but then we have customers who want high visibility, or improved airflow - then we have a more open mesh arrangement for them.

A sustainability goal has been to close the loop on our guarding system to incorporate recycling our production waste to make new product, without compromising our quality and high standards we had worked so hard to create in our virgin grade materials.  

There’s been so much development in plastic recycling in the past few years that’s made what we've been wanting to do possible. We've been working for the last two years on developing a recycled product, and now we've managed to achieve that! 

We now offer a fully recycled product, because we want two things: to be able to let our customers know that we're manufacturing products from recycled materials, and that we're also prepared to recycle our guards when they are no longer required onsite. We are able to reprocess redundant guards into new guards, which is a huge step, a lot of work has gone into getting to this point.

I am sure the recycled option will be a suitable solution for many customers as we are all striving to achieve sustainable practices.  The recycled guards are effectively the same product in terms of mechanical properties, quality and original high standards.