If the glove fits

Comfort and fashion are rarely considered when safety rankings are awarded to personal protection equipment (PPE) designed for a process environment.

But managers who overlook these fundamentals, may well be missing a trick when it comes to reducing plant injury statistics, say safety experts.

The many hazards inherent in a production environment have spawned an entire industry of personal protection gear, serviced by companies such as Eriks, which supplies safety products from leading brands such as Honeywell and 3M to process industry customers.

Cheap personal protection equipment may tick boxes, but it is generally made of lesser quality products and is often not as comfortable

Paul Skade

“Cheap personal protection equipment may tick boxes, but it is generally made of lesser quality products and is often not as comfortable,” says Paul Skade, category manager for tools & maintenance at Eriks.

“We try to focus where we can on the quality end of the PPE market. These products deliver additional benefits on top of meeting risk requirements.”

Eriks offers its process industry clients head-to-toe industrial protection, which includes hard hats, eyewear, respiratory and hearing protection, gloves, footwear and specialist clothing.

While the aesthetics of such products have remained largely unchanged, the materials have come on leaps and bounds, says Skade.

“A hard hat still looks like a hard hat but the base materials have changed over time, offering improved water protection and comfort,” he says.

There is also an increasing emphasis on areas where workplace injury is difficult to monitor, but can be the cause of retrospective litigation.

“Where the working environment is concerned, employers need to be ever more vigilant in respect to long-term injury,” he says.

“Damage to hearing is one example, and asbestosis is another. Both can occur over very long periods of time so you can’t easily identify where damage actually occurred.”

Here, he says technology is offering up some solutions.

“Improvements such as better foams that can be custom moulded to offer more comfortable hearing protection with better seals for the ear canal are now being developed,” says Skade.

But the key challenge when it comes to enforcing the use of personal protection equipment can hinge on the level of comfort, and that age-old concern with ‘how do I look’.

In these cases, choosing a product simply because it meets minimum safety standards, can prove to be a mistake.

“If you take the example of footwear, that is something you are likely to be wearing all day long, so choosing the wrong product can cause issues such as fatigue, which can in turn have a negative bearing on production,” he says.

But safety standards are too often used as the sole means to choose between products.

“If you take a pair of safety boots that cost £20 and compare them with a pair that cost £100, there has to be a difference in quality,” says Skade.

“And if you buy cheap, you often end up buying several times”.

Standards don’t take any account of the product design or quality of materials, even when it comes to health matters such as reduction of sweating which may cause secondary irritation, says Skade.

“Ultimately if the company’s approach is to provide the right product for an application instead of ticking a box, they are more likely to get user acceptability,” he says.

“The best protection is the sort you forget you are wearing.”

The hands are one area that comes into contact with risk more often than any other part of the body. Nevertheless, where it isn’t mandatory to wear hand protection, most people will choose not to, says Steve Patterson, hand protection specialist at Polyco.

“Often it is only after there has been an accident that an employer will switch to mandatory hand protection,” says Patterson.

“Even then, there is often an element of the workforce that will resist. The biggest issue for any industrial glove wearer is dexterity.”

Patterson says a recent change in the way accidents are reported, however, has revealed which areas of the hand are most vulnerable in plant environments.

“We are seeing more emphasis on the back of hands, and there has also been a big switch to full hand protection rather than just palm protection,” he says.

While this knowledge is helping to reduce the incidence of hand injuries in the workplace, he still sees inadequate protection measures in place.

However, technology is coming to the rescue with different mixes of fibres now bringing maximum cut-protection gloves in a very thin gauge.

“It is the way it is woven and manufactured, offering almost double the cut protection compared with five years ago,” says Patterson.

New formulations of latexes, nitriles and PVCs are also solving the problem of poor grip afflicting many chemical-resistant gloves.

“We now aerate the material so gloves are filled with little air bubbles, and this acts like a tyre tread, giving the operator a much higher performance grip,” he says.

But even this cannot solve the growing problems associated with touch-screen control pads used in hazardous environments.

In this application, most industrial gloves simply wont work, says Patterson, because there is no transfer from the glove onto the screen.

“We are now working on a range with carbon filament in-built into finger tips of gloves and that gives contact with electronic screens so the operator doesn’t have to remove hand protection in areas of harm,” he says.

When it comes to handling chemicals, selecting appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) can be a daunting process says Neil Sutherland, personal protection account manager at DuPont.

“PPE is highly prone to being under-specified, over-specified or even wrongly specified resulting in unnecessary risks to personnel,” says Sutherland.

Because the consequences of exposure to some chemicals only manifest several years down the line, it is “essential to undertake a systematic risk analysis when assessing and selecting specialist PPE for chemical protection,” he says.

PPE is highly prone to being under-specified, over-specified or even wrongly specified resulting in unnecessary risks to personnel

Neil Sutherland

Sutherland advises safety professionals to look beyond nominal measures and look at the ‘whole safety picture’ to protect workers from unnecessary exposure to chemicals.

This means that methods for removing the hazard altogether must always be exhausted before considering ways of limiting operator exposure.

“It is clearly not sufficient to simply rely on trying to interpret generic industry standards or to just meet ‘legal minimums’,” he says.

“PPE that is difficult to don or doff, that is uncomfortable to wear, that curtails movement or unduly restricts work activities will always meet user resistance.”

Another key issue is the huge breadth of protection available within each of the different European PPE performance classifications.

The theoretical level of protection on offer from PPE is rarely, if ever, achieved in practice, says Sutherland, and CEN standards and other classifications pay little, if any, attention to ergonomics.