Operation Clean Sweep — zero pellet loss and batch traceability across the supply chain

Definition

Operation Clean Sweep (OCS) is a voluntary, international plastics-industry programme — run in Europe by PlasticsEurope — whose goal is to prevent pellets, flakes and polymer dust from escaping into the environment at every stage of the supply chain. Signatories commit to striving for zero raw-material loss: from the producer’s reactor, through transport, transloading and storage, all the way to the processor’s line.

Put simply: the point is that not a single pellet should escape the process to a place where it does not belong. From a terminal’s perspective this is not a slogan from a marketing brochure but a daily discipline at the funnel and tray.

Scale of the problem: why pellets escape

Polymer pellets are a form of primary microplastic. Grains 2–5 mm in diameter — the typical lens-shaped or cylindrical pellet — do not break down in the environment on any reasonable timescale. Once lost, they travel with stormwater into drains, rivers and ultimately the sea, where animals mistake them for food. It is a lasting trace of a single moment of inattention during transfer.

The scale stems from the very structure of the market. About 80 percent of plastics processed in the European Union come in pellet form, 2–5 mm. This means that almost every tonne of raw material, before it becomes a product, passes through many operations of transfer, filling and emptying. Each such operation is a potential spill point. A single grain looks insignificant, but multiplied by millions of tonnes and thousands of terminals across Europe, it begins to carry environmental weight.

The most common sources of loss are:

It is worth noting that most of these points are operations at the packaging–installation interface: where the big-bag (FIBC) meets the funnel, and the funnel meets the silo tanker. These are precisely the places audited first.

The six pillars of OCS good practice

The OCS programme comes down to a few simple but consistently applied principles. At the terminal I arrange them into six pillars:

1. Commitment and responsibility. Someone has to own the topic. Without an assigned person and a clear message from management, even the best procedures stay on paper. Here, every shift knows that a spill is captured, not swept under the machine.
2. Risk-point audit. You walk the pellet’s route and mark every place where a grain can escape. This is not a one-off stroll — risk points change with the product mix and the season.
3. Capture equipment. Trays and mats under filling stations, sealed funnels, sealing collars on spigots, drain grates with screens that retain pellets, easily accessible brooms and industrial vacuum cleaners.
4. Procedures and training. The operator must know what to do the moment a spill occurs: stop, capture it, collect it into a container for material to be recovered, do not flush it into the sewer. Those are five seconds of decision that determine whether the grain ends up in a bag or in a river.
5. Monitoring and measurement. Regular rounds, a checklist, an incident log — without numbers, the rest remains an impression rather than a fact.
6. Continuous improvement. Every recurring spill in the same spot is a signal to change the funnel design or the procedure, not to sweep up once more.

The most important principle is this: spills are captured at the source. Collected clean pellets return to the process or to recovery — they are not waste until they mix with dirt. That is why a separate container for clean pellets stands under every station here.

Transloading without pneumatics and OCS goals

There is one technological factor that does more for OCS than ten procedures combined: replacing pneumatic conveying with gravity transfer. Transloading without pneumatics means the pellets pour from the big-bag into the silo tanker by gravity, without accelerating the grains with compressed air.

The difference is fundamental. In a pneumatic system, the grains race through pipes at speeds of tens of metres per second, striking elbows and walls. This generates dust, fibres, so-called angel hair and fine fragments — precisely the fraction that escapes into the environment most easily and is hardest to capture. Gravity transfer keeps the grain intact: less dust, less loss, a cleaner raw material at the outlet.

This phenomenon ties in with the topic of pellet electrostatic charging. Pneumatics not only crushes the grain but also charges it electrostatically, so dust clings to walls and lingers in the air. The less pneumatics, the less dust, and the easier it is to keep the terminal in a zero-loss regime. At our terminal in Chorula this is the foundation of the entire process — we handle a warehouse of 2,000 big-bags and a throughput of 200 tonnes per day without pneumatics, precisely because this protects both pellet quality and the environment.

What to do with captured pellets

Capturing a spill is only half the task — the second question is what to do with the collected grain. This is where the difference between declared and real discipline is decided. If the collected pellets return to the process as full-value raw material, we have a closed loop and zero loss. If they end up in mixed waste or, worse, on the yard where the first downpour washes them into a drain — all the effort with the trays goes to waste.

At the terminal I have adopted a simple principle of segregation at source. Under every filling station stand two containers: one for clean pellets, collected straight from the tray, unmixed with dirt, which return to the batch or to material recovery, and another for contaminated spillage — swept off the floor together with dust and sand — which goes to recycling or disposal according to its condition. The key is for the operator to decide its destination at the moment of collection, because separating clean from dirty later is uneconomical. The same logic of order governs work with polymer recyclates, where the purity of the fraction determines whether the material is even fit for reprocessing.

Batch traceability — traceability at the terminal

OCS is not only about capturing grains. The second, equally important part of the discipline is batch traceability — the ability to track every batch of raw material from the moment of receipt to the moment of dispatch. In practice this means I can answer the question: which big-bag, from which delivery, with what batch number, went into which silo tanker, when, and who supervised it.

What is in it for the pellet producer? Imagine a quality complaint — the recipient reports that a batch has a parameter deviation. Without traceability you have to halt and check a broad cross-section of deliveries, which costs time and money. With traceability in place I locate the source in hours: I determine exactly which big-bags from which delivery went into the disputed silo tanker, and I withdraw only the defective batch instead of the entire pool. That is the difference between a pinpoint correction and a costly, mass withdrawal.

At the terminal, traceability rests on several elements:

• A batch number on every big-bag — transcribed into the documentation at receipt, not guessed at later.
• A transloading operations log — which raw material, into which silo tanker, in what order.
• Tank cleanliness documentation — confirmation that the silo tanker was clean and dry before filling, which closes the topic of cross-contamination.
• The silo tanker’s registration number and the driver — so the trail reaches all the way to delivery at the customer.

Traceability and batch purity are two sides of the same coin. There is no point in tracking a batch number if you simultaneously allow it to mix with the residue of the previous load. That is why I always pair OCS discipline with a tank cleanliness regime — I describe it in detail in connection with cross-contamination and tank cleanliness under the EFTCO ECD system.

The regulatory environment: from voluntary to mandatory

For years OCS was purely voluntary — a matter of goodwill and reputation. That is changing. At European Union level, rules limiting pellet loss across the entire supply chain are being finalised, with mandatory spill-prevention procedures, risk-management plans and certification by independent bodies for larger operators. The direction is unambiguous: what is good practice today will tomorrow be a legal requirement.

This move fits into the wider regulatory environment for plastics — from PPWR and the requirements for recyclates and packaging to the REACH system for chemicals. All these acts share one logic: the producer and operator must document that they have control over the material at every stage. OCS is the simplest entry into this logic, because it concerns something tangible — the grain, which either stays in the process or escapes from it.

From my practitioner’s perspective the matter is simple: companies that adopted good practices early will enter the new requirements calmly, because they already have trays, screens, logs and habits. Those that left the topic to the last minute will have to rebuild their process under audit pressure. That is why in Chorula we treat OCS not as a cost but as a standard that would have caught up with us anyway.

How to measure OCS effectiveness

A programme remains an empty declaration if no one checks whether it works. That is why, in terminal practice, OCS translates into a few simple indicators that can be maintained without an elaborate system. The most important is the spill incident log — a short note about where, when and how much pellet spilled. The point is not to penalise operators but to capture recurring spots. If the same funnel drips every week, that is not a people problem but a design one, and it must be rebuilt.

The second indicator is the result of inspection rounds. A designated person walks the pellet’s route according to a checklist and notes whether trays are in position, whether the screens on the grates are clear, and whether there is no spillage around the spigots. The third, most tangible one, is the amount of clean pellets recovered from the trays in a given period — the less, the better the tightness of the process, because it means fewer grains escape in the first place. These three numbers, kept consistently, say more about the state of OCS than the thickest binder of procedures. What gets measured can be improved — and when it comes to pellet loss, improvement is always possible.

Benefit for the customer

For a pellet producer, working with a terminal that runs OCS means two concrete values. First, loss minimisation — less spillage means less wasted raw material and a cleaner environmental footprint that can be shown in one’s own sustainability report. Second, batch documentation — full traceability that protects against a costly, broad withdrawal in the event of a complaint.

These two benefits are tangible and measurable. We deliver them as part of the standard service of big-bag to silo-tanker transloading, complemented by storage with batch control. We work in this model with regular customers from the plastics industry, for whom purity, traceability and zero loss are not an add-on but a condition of entry. All the materials handled are non-ADR raw materials: PE, PP, ABS, PS, PA, PET and other plastics that transfer well and are not dangerous goods.

Related topics

OCS is best understood in the context of the entire technology of safe transloading. Start with transloading without pneumatics, which reduces dust at the source, and with big-bags (FIBC) — the packaging whose discharge is a key risk point. Batch discipline is rounded out by the topic of cross-contamination, and the legal environment by the PPWR rules. You will find the full map of transloading services on the services page, and the transport context of the entire network on magnumchorula.pl/transport.

Sources

• PlasticsEurope, Operation Clean Sweep — programme guidelines (a pellet-loss prevention programme).
• Industry materials on primary microplastic and pellet loss in the plastics supply chain.
• Practice of the SMIALA / PHS Magnum transloading terminal, Chorula.
• Expert commentary: Aleksy Pasternak, bulk-material terminal practitioner.