Boucherie's Anchor Free Technology; Winner of the 2008 FEIBP Award for Innovation.

During the latest FEIBP congress in Marseille, Boucherie was proud to be voted winner of the FEIBP Innovation Award 2008. The AFT-HH technology for the production of anchorless household- and hygienic brushes is indeed a true innovation, and could very well profoundly change the brush making industry in the coming years.

Typical for the AFT-HH technology, is that pre-cut filaments are picked with a picker, arranged in a tuft pattern, and are attached to a thin base plate without the use of anchors or staples. Here, it is important to see the difference between the old fashioned fusion process and AFT: AFT allows the use of different materials for the filaments and the brush block or base plate, while fusion can only work with identical materials. Typical AFT-HH products can use PP blocks and combine this with PET, PVC, PA, PP or Polyester filaments, just like conventionally stapled brushes. The patented design of the AFT-HH base plate allows a good anchoring of the filaments to the plate, without the use of anchors or staples. Once the filaments and the base plate are joint, the brush can be completed by means of over-moulding, or by further assembly with a cap.
The products made with this process have substantial advantages over brushes that are made in the traditional way: for a typical indoor broom, savings in material up to 10 Ûcent per product, or 33% of the approximate material cost are easily realized. Secondly, totally new brush designs are possible utilizing block tufts, strip tufts, special trim configurations and the inclusion of TPE elements. For the first time in a century, truly innovative products may be mass produced in an economically effective way. Thirdly, this type of brush design has a greatly reduced environmental footprint versus conventional brushes: there is much less material used, significant energy is saved because less material has to be plasticized, and the products are fully recyclable because there are no longer any metals in the brushes. This ecological aspect of the AFT-HH process can be used as a powerful marketing tool, but will also bring substantial financial advantages over conventional production techniques as the whole industry will be taxed more and more based on their energy consumption and CO2 quotas.

The process too brings important advantages; the most striking one of which is the production speed: with two filling tools running at up to 750 tufts per minute, without any time lost in indexing movements, the output of the machine is at least 50% higher than any high-performance conventional drilling and filling machine, enhancing the use of factory floor space and reducing the labour component in the product cost. Secondly, if the option of over-moulding is chosen, there is an important reduction of intermediate storage and handling of materials and semi-finished products, as block injection and tufting are brought together in one production cell. Thirdly, there are no drills or trimmers in the machine, which saves on maintenance and spare parts as well as filament materials.
For household brushes, however, the product cost is a crucial point, and that is exactly where the forte of the AFT technology lies. As an illustration: with a capacity of about 2,5 million indoor brooms per year in three shifts, gaining 10Ûcent per unit in materials, this anchorless process can save the producer 250 000 Û in materials alone, not counting any other advantages. These figures certainly speak for themselves.
This, combined with all the other mentioned attributes, has the potential to revolutionize the brush manufacturing industry.