Not one single kilometer of road
to transport 5,000 T of Powergom

3,800 tons of Powergom shreds were loaded onto 3 barges from the Harnes waterway platform. Dunkirk is a day's sailing.

At the end of June, Aliapur will send off a ship loaded with 5,000 tonnes of Powergom shred (products from 670,000 tires) from Dunkirk to Dakar to supply the cement works in Rufisque with an alternative fuel source. This delivery will be made under strict surveillance as it features a number of new elements. Not only is it a cooperation with a new cement factory owned by the French cement maker, Vicat, but it is also both a new port of departure and a new destination: until now, Aliapur has never sent products from Dunkirk, nor delivered to Senegal, which will become the first country in West Africa served by the sector.

Above all, it is a first for the routing method used, in conformity with Aliapur’s strategy to limit the use of road transport as much as possible each time: from their production site to the port of Dunkirk, the 5,000 tonnes of tyre shred will thus have managed the singular exploit of not having travelled on any roads at all. With 26 tonnes per truck, that thus means that the CO2 emissions of 192 trucks that will have been avoided.

Dunkirk, accessible by both canals and the sea

In concrete terms, the Powergom destined for Dakar comes from two transformation sites: Gilles Henry and Ramery. As Gilles Henry is situated in the immediate vicinity of the waterway hub in Toul (near Nancy), on the Moselle, 1,500 tonnes of shred were loaded on to a barge on 13 May and will reach the port of Dunkirk via the canal network in a week. For Ramery, the site backs on to the waterway hub in Harnes (near Lens), on the Deûle canal, and 3,500 tonnes of Powergom will be loaded on to 3 barges by early June and will reach Dunkirk in a day’s sailing.

Like Fos-sur-Mer (Marseille), out of which Aliapur has been working for a dozen year already, Dunkirk has the particularity of being accessible by both canals and the sea. It is also a large enough port to be able to absorb the in-transit storage of 5,000 tonnes of Powergom until the bulk carrier is loaded at the end of June.

In the short term, Aliapur furthermore hopes to be able to suppress the transit phase, with direct loading from the barges to the ships instead.