Cascades & Rittal: A Greener Environment on Paper
November 16, 2022
Founded in 1964, Cascades, headquartered in Quebec, offers sustainable, innovative and value-added solutions for packaging, hygiene and recovery needs. The company employs approximately 10,000 employees who work in almost 80 facilities in North America.
The mission of Cascades is to improve the well-being of people, communities and the planet by providing sustainable and innovative solutions that create value. Cascades specializes in producing, converting and marketing packaging and tissue products that are composed mainly of recycled fibres. Their product lines include:
- Packaging Solutions: Eco-friendly packaging solutions from Cascades reflect the trends and challenges of the market.
- Hygiene and Tissue Solutions: Cascades’ hygiene and tissue paper solutions are designed for residential, commercial or professional needs.
- Fibre-based materials: Cascades’ tissue papers are mainly made from recycled papers. Their effective, eco-friendly packaging solutions are made with linerboard and corrugated medium (fluting paper), and their speciality paper is made from recycled fibre.
Everything that the Company does is for a greener, cleaner future. In 2022, for the third consecutive year, Cascades has been recognized as one of the world’s 100 most sustainable corporations, according to the prestigious Global 100 index, produced by Corporate Knights.
The Cascades Challenge
At Cascades, they believe there is always a better way of doing things: a better way to package and protect products, a better way to manage residual materials; a better way to create a cleaner world. Hence, Cascades believes in working with tried and tested eco-friendly equipment of the highest quality that can conserve energy and resources in terms of materials, people, time and money! Cascades was looking for an efficient solution to address motor control, power management and quality control challenges in their plants. The objective of this project was to succeed in maximizing the space in each of the panels compared to the use of a Motor Control Centre (MCC) Solution. Also, previous projects used Wallmounted enclosures but as the bottom of the wall space was wasted, more wall space was required in existing electrical rooms. Using the Motor Control Panel (MCP) solution maximizes the wall space that is often lacking in factories.
The Rittal & EPLAN Solution
Cascades had a long-standing relationship with Jacmar, a leading industrial automation and controls distributor in Quebec, and one of Rittal’s oldest partners in Canada.
Cascades had been using Rittal’s market-leading enclosures since the past 20 years and they were aware that what sets Rittal apart from other industrial automation partners is their capacity to meet specific client needs reliably and quickly in order to engineer the scalable industrial automation solutions necessary to remain competitive and agile in a quickly changing marketplace. Not only could Rittal provide market-leading enclosure solutions, but their team could also use EPLAN power engineering and configuration to design the solution from start to finish.
Cascades had worked on projects involving drives which are sometimes integrated into MCCs or wallmounted enclosures. For a recent major project, the panel and MCC solutions were not viable from a space availability point of view, so Cascades were ready to consider Rittal’s MCP solution which saved more than 30% of space in the electrical rooms.
Moreover, sourcing Rittal’s Motor Control Panel (MCP) solution from a local distributor like Jacmar, provided Cascades with access to local stock, faster delivery, and convenient part replacement.
Eplan conception by Jacmar
Jacmar carried out panel mounting simulations with the most frequent drive in the project, 25 hp, using EPLAN Engineering Software, which allowed them to confirm that 2 X 25 Hp drives could be assembled in an MCP solution while in the MCC Arcflash solution, only one drive could be installed. This made it possible to reduce the number of panels required for the project by half, thus obtaining savings in terms of space and costs.
Based on Rittal’s proven architecture of their free-standing TS 8 enclosure system, Rittal’s Motor Control Panel (MCP) with EPLAN’s Design Software, was the perfect solution to address Cascades’ motor control, power management and quality control challenges.
The benefits of Rittal’s MCP solution included:
- speed of design and build,
- customization from standard parts,
- flexibility of design,
- cost-effective integrated solution,
- easy configuration with Rittal Power Engineering
- CSA/UL certified for use in Canada
- Plug & pay; standard parts
- Configurable at all stages
Designed, engineered and manufactured to meet the needs of Canadian specifiers and contractors, the modular design enables easy configuration and short delivery times.
Another factor that made it efficient for Cascades and Rittal to work together, was the fact that they received direct support from the manufacturer at all stages of the build. Rittal was able to build the enclosure, providing proof of concept along with CAD drawings, in their state-of-the-art Modification Centre in Ontario, so shipping to Quebec was not an issue at all, saving valuable transportation costs.
Results: Best of both Worlds
For large engineered industrial processes at Cascades, power distribution can be very complex. Using a control panel is an efficient solution to include all the VFD and motor components required. Each motor was connected separately to a VFD, and that starter is individually mounted or contained in a larger control panel. Rittal’s MCP offered Cascades the best of both worlds: the efficient component organization of a control panel, as well as the ability to reduce the number of columns needed for the projects.
Cascades was pleasantly surprised that it took just about a week for the power engineering, and about 2 months’ time to build the solution from start to finish.
