Page 22 - Occupational Health & Safety, January/February 2019

HAND PROTECTION
The standard includes three performance levels, with the corre- sponding performance level displayed directly on industrial gloves to give specifiers and procurement professionals a simple, visual indication of the performance standard.
ager at PPE manufacturer Majestic Glove, “then the value will continue to increase.”
Moving Forward
The new ANSI/ISEA 138 standard will help health and safety professionals evaluate the performance of industrial gloves by provid- ing a consistent approach for testing and performance appraisal.
Christine Fargo, ISEA’s director of Member and Technical Services, was criti- cal to pulling together the standard and be- lieves it will make a difference in workplace injuries. “We want to be able to write and design something that people are going to use,” she said. “End users ultimately need to understand why a particular standard ex- ists—why there is a number or mark on the product label and what that means for the selection process.
“With a classification scheme—if you’ve got levels one, two, or three—you want to make sure you’re helping some- one select a product by looking at the haz- ards, and at the current workplace struc- ture,” she added. “They don’t want to be overprotecting, because there might be a trade-off, whether that it is in dexterity or user comfort. You are going to be able to tell if it’s meaningful when you see it speci- fied in say commercial bids for companies buying products. When end users are ask- ing manufacturers, ‘Show me the label; show me this glove meets the 138.’”
For occupational health and safety pro- fessionals in all sectors where safety is a number one priority, the new standard will provide a more complete framework by which they can confidently select the glove or portfolio of gloves best suited to their people, reducing workplace injuries and providing cost savings.
Rodney Taylor, MS, MBA, has more than 15 years of experience in the safety indus- try. Working as a researcher at the NASA Langley Research Center, he moved on to become a process engineer, operations man- ager, marketing, and sales leader at DuPont before joining D3O global, to develop and introduce D3O® technologies for the PPE sec- tor. He is the company’s US PPE Sector Lead.
SOURCES
1. Preparing your business for the new glove dor- sal impact protection standard, Lucie Ponting. Downloadable from www.d3o.com/isea138
In an industry first, the International Safety Equipment Association (ISEA) has developed a new voluntary standard to ad- dress this: ANSI/ISEA 138, American na- tional standard for performance and classi- fication for impact resistant hand protection.
The standards committee responsible for developing ISEA 138 is made up of leading glove manufacturers, materials experts D3O, and expert insight from Dr. Lloyd Champagne, a surgeon based in Phoenix, Ariz., who focuses on plastic and reconstructive hand surgery.
“As far as what anatomy in the hand is most vulnerable,” said Champagne, “the two main problem areas are the fingertips, which are very commonly injured because they are the part that is universally in con- tact with everything, and the big knuckles, which are frequently impacted by things such as wrenches slipping or people catch- ing their hands under the hood of a car.”
Measuring Performance
ANSI/ISEA 138 promises to be a game changer for workplace PPE. Specifically designed for industrial gloves, the new standard will establish a minimum perfor- mance, classification, and labeling require- ment for hand protection products de- signed to protect the knuckles and fingers from impact forces.
There has been an explosion of indus- trial dorsal impact protection products in the past decade. For specifiers, this huge influx of products poses a huge challenge when it comes to selecting the right gloves. Currently, you often see either no perfor- mance claims made on these products or completely different measures for perfor- mance, leaving no reliable, objective means of making comparisons between impact- protective gloves.
Without a reliable guide, buyers and safety departments may under- or over- specify gloves, incurring unnecessary ex- pense or leaving workers open to injury.
“What’s the most appropriate glove for back-of-hand impact protection? Until now, I have not been able to definitively answer the question,” said Dan Markie- wicz, an independent environmental
health and safety consultant. “It normally boils down to trial and error: Obtain a variety of gloves that are advertised as of- fering impact protection, have employees try them out, get feedback, and go with the gloves most preferred by the end us- ers. And what often happens after this? It’s called trial and error for a reason. Eventu- ally, an employee will inadvertently drop a tool on their hand and sustain an impact injury. That is not prevention, and it is a poor way to allocate resources.”
The standard includes three perfor- mance levels, with the corresponding performance level displayed directly on industrial gloves to give specifiers and procurement professionals a simple, visual indication of the performance standard. In addition to the pictogram, the new standard also raises the bar for testing re- quirements within a standard. Unlike most standards from ANSI, where manufactur- ers are on an “honor system” with regard to publishing test results, 138 requires test- ing in a laboratory that meets the require- ments of laboratory conformity assessment standard IEC 17025. This requirement for testing will increase the credibility of glove performance claims. An additional distin- guishing feature of this new standard is the inclusion of knuckles and fingers in the testing, where the EN 388 standard cov- ers just the knuckles. The inclusion of the fingers is critical for industrial glove users, where the fingers are frequently at risk.
One of the key principles driving the creation of the standard has been simplicity.
One of the key principles driving the creation of the standard has been simplic- ity. This is always a challenge in standards development, and there are existing stan- dards that are so complicated that the peo- ple actually conducting the testing cannot say how it is done. “If you make it simple, easytounderstandandtoimplement,and clear that it protects workers’ hands—based on the performance of materials and cover- age,”saidVincentKruiniger,generalman-
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