Jyrki Koro the president of Truck Wash Technologies said new technologies designed to improve the cleaning and disinfection of swine transport trailers must be economically viable.
TWT designs and builds custom automated truck wash systems focussing on complex cleaning applications and is a partner in a Swine Innovation Porc initiative aimed at speeding up and reducing the cost of cleaning and disinfecting swine transport trailers. The objective is to develop a system to wash the interior and the exterior.
The vehicle needs washing on the inside and the outside.
“We’ve established doing it exteriorly and we’re marrying it with some technology to clean the interior equally well. Every trailer is not the same so want to create some intelligence and flexibility to do many types of trailers.”
The goal is to minimize human involvement in the cleaning process and find an economical and effective method.
Challenges no doubt, but the biosecurity aspect is finding a cost-effective way of doing it and lowering the cost and time to wash these vehicles. Hence, they’re not off the road longer than needed.
“If you can put a man on the moon, you can do anything if you’ve got enough money.”
However, if not economically viable, it won’t offer a viable business model, regardless of who would establish such a facility privately or publicly funded.
The primary motivation is animal welfare. Livestock travels south and disease spreads as the current pandemic shows. So there’s a keen interest in mitigating disease spread and clear that animal transport is one of the main vectors of transmitting disease from one animal to the other.
Research shows the costs of euthanizing and destroying animals when infected in various industries are pretty substantial so animal welfare is first and foremost in the thought process.
The company is doing complementary work to improve trailer designs to make them easier to wash.
Interestingly, developing new innovative technologies in an industry that’s seen little technological change in 40 years. However, in recent years, extensive research and development, building working models, and forging critical alliances have created vehicle wash solutions never seen before in the automated large vehicle wash industry.
TWT’s objective is to build the right vehicle wash system that precisely meets each customer’s needs: a flexible and user-friendly system while consistently performing above that of the status quo. •
— By Harry Siemens