Munters chooses rail transport

Munters uses rail to a larger extent than before. The goal is to make the transport of materials and products as sustainable as possible.

At the beginning of the year, the first transport of rotor blocks by rail was sent from Munters’ factory in Tobo in Sweden to Jiangyin in China. That’s where the company has one of its production facilities. The goal is to ship two containers a month in this way to China. In the coming months, about 30 containers will also be shipped from Germany to China by rail.

Anna Stegfeldt, Head of Logistics and Supply Chain at Munters, is very pleased with the result.

"Rail is more expensive than sea transport but faster, which allows us to shorten the lead time to better support our customers,” she says. “It is also makes us more flexible in terms of production."

Benefits the planet and bottom line

In Mexico, Munters has been using train transport since 2018. From its factory in Monterrey, the company uses intermodal (train and truck) to transport fiberglass rolls and paper rolls to the United States.

“Depending on our needs, we use intermodal most weeks,” says Irma Ibarra, Customs and Logistics Manager at Munters, Mexico.  “If for some reason there is a need to speed up an order, we only use truck.”

The cost savings for using intermodal have been substantial.

“On average, the cost reduction is about 50% of both of these products that we collect with our suppliers,” says Ibarra. “During this year we have collected an average of nine train containers per month. By using trains, we have reduced our emissions by more than 85 metric tons of carbon.”

Makes use of local suppliers

Ibarra and her team have also started looking at using local suppliers for some of the chemicals they use to reduce transportation between the US and Mexico.

A good example of this is the sourcing of phenolic resin in 2019, which reduced the transport of the product from 3000 km to 15km.

“We want to reduce air freight as much as possible,” Stegfeldt says. “We do this from both an environmental and cost perspective. Our experience so far is that rail transport is a good alternative when we need to speed up a delivery to meet a tight deadline.”

Find out what we do to reduce our footprint. Read more here.