Page 76 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2018

HAND PROTECTION
ISEA 138: RaTising the Standard for Hand Impact Protection
BY RODNEY TAYLOR
72 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2018
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he bones and soft tissues in the back of the focuses on cut, abrasion, tear, and puncture perfor- hand are all vulnerable to impact injuries, mance and does not address the threat from impact. varying from bumps and bruises to severe Until recently, the European industrial glove market bone fractures. Many people mistakenly be- was in a similar position. This changed in 2016, how-
lieve that hand impact injuries only affect a narrow range of industries, such as the offshore oil and gas sector, mining, and construction. In reality, the mar- ket is much wider, with impact-related injuries also being a common danger for manufacturing, ware- house, and transport workers.
To protect workers from impact hazards, personal protective equipment (PPE) manufacturers produce a wide range of gloves to protect people, with new de- signs and materials constantly entering the market. In the last two years there has been an explosion of gloves with dorsal TPR protection. Yet there is either: little differentiation between the materials used for impact protection or performance claims that can’t be readily validated. While some of these gloves include some sort of performance claims, to date there has been no commonly agreed performance standard or test method in North America for dorsal (back of hand) impact protection.
As a result, the market for impact gloves has ex- panded dramatically in recent years, driven in part by advances in technology and the range of materials available. However, those developments have caused a certain amount of misunderstanding and confu- sion. To take one example, a wide range of materials used in gloves claim to provide impact protection, many of which come under the umbrella term TPR. Yet TPR is a generic term that encompasses a broad range of materials. It means a wide range of gloves may all be labelled TPR but have very different per- formance attributes.
The absence of any objective performance stan- dard creates a serious challenge for the professionals responsible for selecting appropriate PPE for indus- trial workers. With so many different products on the market, how do they evaluate and assess the quality of the impact protection offered?
The main consequence of the lack of any useful “measuring stick” for those gloves is to reduce the ability of end-users to choose the right protection for their workforces in a cost-effective way. At best, this results in market confusion; at worst, it can result in under- or over-specification of gloves, incurring un- necessary expense for companies or leaving workers vulnerable to injury.
A Market First
There is a hand protection standard in North America. However, the existing ANSI/ISEA 105: 2016, American National Standard for Hand Protection Classification
ever, with revision of the EN 388 gloves standard. EN 388: 2016 Protective gloves against mechanical risks in- cluded an impact testing element for the first time.
Now, for the first time in the United States, lead- ing glove manufacturers and material suppliers such as D3O have come together to collaborate in develop- ing a new voluntary standard from the International Safety Equipment Association—ISEA, an American National Standards Institute-accredited standards de- veloping organization.
ISEA 138, American national standard for per- formance and classification for impact resistant hand protection, aims to improve on the fairly limited treat- ment of impact performance recently incorporated into the main European hand protection standard, EN 388. That standard took its cues from an exist- ing motorcycle impact standard for hand protection. The ISEA 138 standard, by contrast, is specifically de- signed for industrial gloves and the special protection they offer to workers.
Work on producing the new standard has been under way since 2016. It is being carried out by a spe- cialist subgroup of ISEA’s long-established hand pro- tection group and is on track to be published by the end of the year. The impact standard working group includes representatives from seven major glove man- ufacturers, as well as materials experts D3O and input from a physician who specializes in plastic and recon- structive hand surgery.
The degree of collaboration and agreement within the group has been fantastic and reflects the market’s appetite for change. The primary focus throughout the whole development process has been to produce a new standard that is simple, practicable, and easy for end-users to understand.
Industry-Accepted Criteria
The proposed ISEA 138 standard will, for the first time in the United States, provide industry-accepted test criteria to measure how effectively different dor- sal impact protective gloves reduce peak impact force across the hand.
It will be a stand-alone document that focuses on impact performance while also aiming to complement the cut, abrasion, puncture, and tear components of the existing ANSI/ISEA 105: 2016 document. The planned standard will define an agreed test method; include defined performance levels; specify a picto- gram mark for each of the defined levels for compliant gloves; and require that product be tested in a labora-