Welcome to the 1st May Warehouse & Logistics News. In this issue we’ve got features on Warehouse Flooring, including floor preparation, maintenance, mezzanines and area markings, and Packaging, including returnable transit packaging, stretch wrappers and other forms of protection used in the supply chain.
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The first Monday in May is traditionally a UK Bank Holiday, and this year it falls on 7th May. Most of us are glad of a Bank Holiday any time. But given Mayday’s associations with military parades in the old Communist bloc, many Brits prefer to call it the clunky ‘Early May Bank Holiday’! It seems ridiculous but some of our politicians are uncomfortable with a public holiday at the beginning of the month, and were supposedly talking last year about moving the day to St George’s Day in April in England and St David’s Day in March in Wales, presumably to cut the ties with the old Soviet Workers’ Day Off! Thankfully they haven’t got their way yet.
‘Mayday’ is of course also an emergency procedure word, used internationally as a distress signal in radio communications. Which brings us back to our Flooring feature. The intro highlights slips, trips and falls as the single largest cause of major injury in the workplace, possibly costing the UK economy up to £850m a year. According to the HSE’s excellent publication ‘Warehousing and Storage – keep it safe’, slip and trip accidents are often seen as trivial and ‘just one of those things,’ but most of them can be avoided.
Slips usually happen because floors are wet or contaminated. Water, oil, cleaning products, dry powders and foodstuffs can all make warehouse floors slippery. Items like stretch wrapping, label backing and plastic bags can also cause slips. The HSE’s advice is to stop floors getting contaminated, by such measures as maintaining equipment properly, and when contamination happens, deal with it immediately.
Most floors have good slip resistance when clean, dry and level. However, smooth floors that become even a little bit wet or contaminated will be slippery; the rougher the floor, the better it copes with water and other contamination, and the less likely someone is to slip. Objects left on the floor are usually the cause of trips. Trip hazards can include items like goods, waste packaging, banded strapping loops and pallets, so don’t leave them lying there – pick them up.
Have a safe month and a good Bank Holiday – whatever you like to call it!
Warehouse & Logistics News
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