PPS Equipment Management Ltd, long established in the supply of returnable transit equipment (RTE) and services related to it, will shortly launch a new website www.ppsfish.co.uk.

By its very name it will come as no surprise that this new website, which complements the other main PPS website www.ppsequipment.co.uk is aimed squarely at the fish industry – both in farmed fish and also landed fish.

Measham, Derbyshire June 2009

Offering services connected to returnable transit equipment has been the core business of PPS for the past six years. Based at Measham in the Midlands but operating throughout the UK, from the North of Scotland to West Wales to Cornwall, PPS has built a reputation as a provider of such products as wire mesh cage, wire containers, plastic crates, boxes and trays, plastic pallets, steel roll cages and also pallet boxes – both plastic and steel.

PPS, originally called Plastic Pallet Systems, works with its clients to determine firstly what type of RTE they want – this is usually for outward deliveries, but may also be for internal use or even simply storage within an organisation. Whenever goods are despatched the client enters details on Enable, the PPS proprietary online asset tracking system. Enable was developed in-house at PPS some years ago and is designed to be deliberately simple to use and to understand.

At this point, PPS now knows where the crates, pallets etc are and arranges to collect this equipment from the third parties. Any discrepancies are quickly resolved due to the transparent nature of the Enable system and critically as anyone handling any PPS crates, pallets, boxes etc signs a Customer Agreement to the effect that they will not misuse, abuse or use in any other way and piece of PPS equipment other than to offload goods on arrival and make that equipment ready for collection. In the early days of operations, there were a few isolated incidents where customers decided to sign the Customer Agreement but then to deliberately flaunt it, but these disputes were then, as they are now, quickly resolved. So successful is PPS with equipment management that they claim an “almost 100% retrieval rate” – unheard of in this type of industry.

Some years ago at commencement of operations, PPS gained considerable success supplying RTE to the raw poultry sector and indeed this is still a cornerstone of its success.
Having also successfully penetrated the dairy sector and in a small way the pharmaceutical and retail sectors, the ambitious PPS decided to look at the fishing sector – both fish farming or aquaculture and also the landed catch disciplines.

The first area PPS decided to target was the logistics of transporting farmed fish, mainly salmon, from the sea lochs in North and West Scotland to the fish processors, many of whom are to be found in our around Grimsby. The traditional method of transporting fish – either whole fish or portions, has been in 20 or 25 litre expanded polystyrene boxes, EPS being chosen for its insulation properties.

However due to the construction of EPS boxes, they cannot be re-used as it is impossible to clean them to a high enough standard for more than a single trip. So, at the processing plant, once the EPS box is emptied all that can be done with it is to scrap it.
This involves crushing or “compacting” the box, but as anyone who has ever tried to get rid of polystyrene packaging knows, this is no easy task! The processors must then find someone willing to remove the broken down boxes – in good times they will be paid a small sum for the waste, but in more difficult times they may end up paying to have this waste removed from their site.

PPS has an alternative to these one-way trip boxes – and that is returnable plastic fish boxes which can be used time and time again and are washed to an extremely high standard by PPS at their own wash sites (the company has recently been accredited to ISO 22000:2005).

There is an obvious positive effect on the carbon footprint of sending out fish in reusable boxes, however with the best will in the world the project will only succeed if there is a cost benefit to it!

Again PPS leads the way on this – a one-way trip EPS box will typically cost around £1.40 whereas the single trip cost using a returnable PPS box may be closer to £1.00 – depending on volumes and geographical locations.

Director of PPS Iain McArthur says “We are currently talking to a number of people within the fish farming industry about our proposal to switch to returnable or reusable packing like our plastic boxes. We have oddly, encountered certain pockets of resistance, even when we prove that ours is a cost-saving measure, simply because most people are suspicious of change! We talk them through every aspect of how the system works and they then hopefully realise that very little in their lives will change – we take care of supplying them with clean boxes and take the responsibility of collecting used boxes from their suppliers, having it washed or sterilised before repeating the cycle.”

PPS will shortly launch www.ppsfish.co.uk which will give further information on all aspects of their activities in both farmed and landed fish.