Page 37 - Occupational Health & Safety, August 2018

facturers will be to meet the demands of tomorrow’s PPE users for greater comfort, style, performance, and productivity, while still providing maximum protection.
If wearable tech delivers ever-more- accurate information about the nature of the physical risks workers face, PPE pro- viders will have to respond more quickly to changing demands.
In industrial PPE, two of the key influential sectors are sports and the military.
Leveraging Other Industries to Drive Compliance
In PPE, two of the key influential sectors are sports and the military. “There are lots of crossovers with sports,” said Keane. “As sports fabrics have gotten lighter, products such as industrial gloves have also gotten lighter and more flexible. It’s about ergo- nomics, comfort, and performance; the way things fit is very important.”
There is also the sports fashion element. “Workers want to look good,” he said, “so they tend to like a sports look for safety glasses, gloves, or footwear. They don’t want a big, old, clunky leather boot, but perhaps something that looks more like an athletic shoe but with high protection. Toe protection is there, but it might now be a composite, so it’s lighter and more flexible.”
There is also a long history of transfer- ring military protection technologies to industrial safety. DuPontTM Kevlar® is a good example. Although the product came out of experiments to produce lightweight and durable vehicle tires, its biggest commercial application came initially in the military for body armor, such as bulletproof vests, hel- mets, and other protection. It has since been used widely in industrial PPE, as well as in high-performance sporting equipment and consumer products such as cell phones.
Cutting Through the Noise
Within hand protection in the last two years, there has been an explosion of gloves with dorsal TPR protection. While brands market performance claims, to date there has been no commonly agreed perfor- mance standard or test method in North America for dorsal (back-of-hand) impact protection. As a result, the market for im- pact gloves has expanded dramatically in
recent years, driven in part by advances in technology and the range of materials available. However, those developments have caused some misunderstanding and confusion for buyers.
A wide range of materials used in gloves claim to provide impact protection, many of which come under the umbrella term TPR. Yet the production methods are varied, meaning a wide range of gloves may all be labeled TPR but have very differ- ent performance attributes.
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 the production methods are varied, meaning a wide range of gloves may all be labeled TPR but have very different performance attributes.
The absence of an objective performance standard creates a serious challenge for the professionals responsible for selecting ap- propriate PPE for industrial 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 make it more difficult for decision mak- ers 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 unnecessary expense for companies or leaving workers vulnerable to injury.
There is a hand protection standard in North America. However, the existing ANSI/ISEA 105-2016, American National Standard for Hand Protection Classification, focuses on cut, abrasion, tear, and punc- ture performance and does not address the threat from impact.
In an industry first, ISEA is in devel- opment of a new voluntary standard to address this and complement the exist- ing hand protection standard: ANSI/ ISEA 138, American national standard for performance and classification for impact
ANSI/ISEA 138 is specifically designed for industrial gloves, and its levels will provide glove buyers with clarity and confi- dence in their choice.
resistant hand protection. This standard is specifically designed for industrial gloves, and its levels will provide glove buyers with clarity and confidence in their choice. The closest equivalent standard in Europe, EN 388: 2016 Protective gloves against mechani- cal risks, covers the knuckles—ANSI/ISEA 138 will go further to include fingers. This promises to be a game changer for the oil and gas sector, for example, with fingers remaining the most vulnerable part of the body in terms of both lost time and record- able injuries.1
For occupational health and safety professionals in all sectors where safety is a number one priority, the new standard will provide a more complete framework by which they can select the glove or suite of gloves best suited to their people and processes. Compliance with the standard in achieving an acceptable level of perfor- mance will help reduce workplace injuries and provide cost savings, providing speci- fiers with the confidence to then consider additional factors, such as user preference and how comfortable the glove is to wear and work in.
Blanche Maass is a multilingual market- ing professional with seven years’ experience in manufacturing. Born in France, Blanche spent time in the UK, the United States, France, Japan, Spain, and Chile within Brit- ish, American, and French educational sys- tems. After a career debut at Kimberly-Clark Professional EMEA working with brands such as Kleenex®, Scott®, and WypAll®, she brought her marketing expertise into BOC, A Member of the Linde Group, a world- leading supplier of industrial, process, and speciality gases, before joining D3O as Mar- keting Communications lead. D3O is a fast- growth engineering, design, and technology company based in the UK, with offices in China and United States.
REFERENCES
1. 2016 figures collected through the Interna- tional Association of Drilling Contractors
www.ohsonline.com
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