Tata Steel unveils fully sustainable storage facility in IJmuiden

Air-curtains to prevent heat loss, automated loading bays and energy-recovering cranes are just some of the innovations housed in Tata Steel’s new steel coil storage facility in IJmuiden, the Netherlands, designed to be the most sustainable yet. The official opening of the new, ultra-modern storage facility for steel coils take place on Wednesday 8 May.

The so-called LA Hall enables the steel company to optimise logistics processes and further improve deliveries to customers while at the same time being energy neutral. The new 10,000 metre² facility has a capacity of 50,000 tonnes of steel coils and is strategically located, close to the company’s galvanising lines, where the steel is coated with a layer of zinc as protection against corrosion.

"The new storage warehouse  enables us to serve customers even better and to organise the processes on our site even more efficiently," says Hans van den Berg, director of Tata Steel in IJmuiden. “It is also important that this new building, which is entirely constructed from steel and clad with our own steel panels, is a textbook example of how you can construct an extremely functional and fully sustainable building with steel," says van den Berg.

In the new storage warehouse , the very latest technologies have been applied in the field of security and computer technology. The fully automatically controlled LA Hall is twice as large as the other storage facilities on the Tata Steel site in IJmuiden. The building is energy neutral and has been designed in such a way that the residual heat from the cooling water from the nearby  hot strip mill is used to heat it. The cranes in the warehouse are equipped with a system which stores the energy generated when a load is lowered, which can then be used to lift the load. The warehouse is also well insulated.

Source and Photo: Tata Steel in Europe