Many industrial products are designed with worker safety in mind. Every job site contains hazards and potential accidents that can endanger the safety and well being of workers, so utilizing safety equipment is essential. Industrial products for safety are designed to handle specific hazards and to prevent or mitigate certain accidents and injuries.
Matching safety gear and personal protective equipment (PPE) to a job site’s specific hazards is an important aspect of determining the necessary safety industrial products for a given business. In general, the following safety items are found on most job sites and are popular choices for their wide applicability and ability to mitigate hazards.
Protection Above The Neck
Keeping the head, face, eyes, and ears safe is an essential requirement for any worker. Most businesses have a good safety culture that mandates the use of hardhats whenever a person is on the job site. Hardhats are an excellent tool for protecting the head from a host of crushing, impact, and falling hazards.
The hardhat also acts as a platform in which to affix many other industrial products. For protecting the face and eyes, face shields can be affixed and then moved in to and out of place. Finally, ear plugs and ear muffs that can be attached as accessories on a hardhat provide hearing protection.
Preventing Hearing Loss
Hearing protection industrial equipment is a must have for any work site with significant sources of noise. While noisy machines can be quieted to a degree with vibration maintenance tools list pads and leveling devices, most job sites are still noisy. When it comes to hearing loss, the damage is often imperceptible, yet permanent and irreversible.
It pays to be proactive when it comes to hearing conservation. If the noise level is painful, then permanent hearing loss has already occurred. Using industrial equipment that can be affixed directly to a hardhat is an excellent way to utilize protective machine components drawings gear. Disposable ear plugs can also be placed in dispensers that are distributed through a site. Sound barriers, vibration controls, and other engineering controls are also helpful in reducing the overall noise level and supplementing PPE.
Daily Clothing Worn On The Job Site
Worker apparel is designed to be a part of effective PPE, even though many people do not realize it. Heavy duty fabrics, heavy rivets, and reinforced seams form a strong barrier against abrasions, cuts, and other minor injuries. However, apparel can also be used to mitigate many other hazards.
Flame resistant clothing can be used to reduce the severity of burns. Normally, clothing can actually cause burns to be worse than they would have been. Cotton fibers can continue to burn, while synthetic fibers can melt onto the skin. Flame resistant industrial products protect workers by either hardening into a layer of insulation when hit with intense heat, or just harmlessly flake away rather than being an ignition source.
Steel toe boots should also be considered standard issue as safety gear. They have a diverse range of protective qualities, including the steel plate to protect against crushing hazards, non-slip treads and waterproof coatings to deal with wet surfaces, slips, trips, and falls, and high ankle support to prevent sprains and improve posture. For standing water or work with chemicals, latex slip-over boots provide additional protection. At the end of a long shift, footwear has to be comfortable and secure.
Staying Safe At Night
Not every job site has the luxury of being well lit. Many outdoor jobs, especially road crews working on highways at night, and some indoor job sites suffer from low light levels. For road crews, the mixing of passing motorists and construction work is a dangerous recipe. High visibility clothing and industrial products are required for a safe job site.
With the use of reflective industrial equipment, workers can be seen by motorists from up to 1280 feet away, leaving enough room for a vehicle traveling at highway speeds to come to a complete stop. When following ANSI standards for class three high visibility clothing, road crews and motorists alike are better able to react to situations and reduce the potential for accidents. Adding in other industrial products, like signage and barriers to direct the flow of traffic, and even the most complex road construction site can be well managed.
Overall, PPE programs should start simple with hard hats, safety glasses, and steel toe boots. Then, utilizing a safety review, add additional industrial products to meet identified hazards.
