Personal Protective Equipment, or PPE, is designed to protect workers from serious workplace injuries or illnesses resulting from contact with chemical, radiological, physical, electrical, mechanical, or other workplace hazards. Besides face shields, safety glasses, hard hats, safety shoes, protective equipment includes a variety of devices and garments such as goggles, coveralls, gloves, vests, earplugs, and respirators.
Using Personal Protection Equipment is often essential, but it is generally the last line of defense after engineering controls, work practices, and administrative controls. Engineering controls involve physically changing a machine or work environment. Administrative controls involve changing how or when workers do their job, such as scheduling work and rotating workers to reduce exposures. Work practices involve training workers how to perform tasks in ways that reduce their exposure to workplace hazards.
As an employer, you must assess your workplace to determine if hazards are present that require the use of Personal Protective Equipment. If such hazards are present, you must select protective equipment and require workers to use it, communicate your protective equipment selection decisions to your workers, and select personal protective equipment that properly fits your workers.
You must also train workers who are required to wear Personal Protective Equipment on how to do the following:
- Use protective equipment properly,
- Be aware of when personal protective equipment is necessary,
- Know what kind of protective equipment is necessary,
- Understand the limitations of personal protective equipment in protecting workers from injury,
- Put on, adjust, wear, and take off personal protective equipment, and
- Maintain protective equipment properly.
If you are looking for a type of PPE you don’t see in our blog post or on our website, contact us! We can be reached at 888-903-0333 or by email at [email protected], we are happy to help identify, locate, and quote the type of equipment you need.
Personal Protection for the Head and Face
Safety Glasses – Whether you work indoors or outdoors, Pyramex provides safety options for a wide variety of industries and jobs, including welding and lab work.
Ear Protection – Disposable, reusable, or headphone types of earplugs. Damage to your ears can start with decibel levels above 85 dB; working construction or machining or even attending a concert exposes you to decibel levels of up to 120 dB which can cause hearing damage in as little as seven minutes.
Bouffants/Beard Covers – Protect sensitive equipment and food products from contamination while also protecting workers by preventing hair from being tangled into machinery or contacting unsanitary or dangerous material.
Veils and Hoods – More permanent and washable options geared towards cleanroom and pharmaceutical manufacturing applications, used mostly in conjunction with coveralls or “bunny suits”.
Personal Protection for the Body
Disposable Sleeves/Aprons – Protect yourself from splash-back while working with anything from raw meats to lab chemicals. disposable options are great for guests or for use in mobile applications where frequent changing would be expected.
Disposable Lab Coats/Coveralls – These options are an excellent choice for applications where washing would be impractical, such as large scale painting operations or exposures to industrial greases and oils, as well as for guests visiting your job site.
Launderable Cleanroom Garments – Many applications would prefer PPE that can be laundered and reused, such as lab and pharmaceutical applications where contaminants can be easily dealt with.
Personal Protection for the Feet and Hands
Shoes & Boot Covers – Protect your work environment from contaminants as well as your feet and shoes. You can find options from simple disposable shoe covers to reusable knee-high boots that can be used in conjunction with coveralls.
Gloves – Latex, nitrile, or vinyl gloves are an absolute must in the healthcare field as well as in the food handling business. Workers must protect their skin from bodily fluids, greases, oils, chemicals, or anything that might present a health risk as well as protecting products from the oils, skin flakes and germs that are present on our hands.
Gloves have many options depending on the industry you are using them in, besides the vinyl, nitrile, and latex options seen most in food handling and health care, we also offer gloves appropriate for electronics or sensitive material inspection, ESD protection, chemicals, construction, or just general work/material handling.
Other Protective Equipment
Meters & Monitors – In addition to keeping your employees safe with Personal Protection Equipment, help them monitor their environment for dangers and regulate safe levels of noises, gases, heat and more.
ESD Wrist & Straps and Monitors – Protect ESD sensitive equipment and protect workers from harmful shocks by providing wrist straps, grounders, and the ability to monitor their effectiveness.
Anti-Fatigue Matting – Standing workers especially benefit from using anti-fatigue matting. It helps increase circulation to lower extremities which can prevent pain, aching, and potential clotting. Other mat options, like entryway mats, can prevent hazards such as slip and fall accidents.
Ergonomic Accessories – Incorporating proper ergonomics into employees work spaces can prevent injuries and help boost productivity.
Summary
Besides being required by OSHA in most cases, the use of personal protective equipment can reduce injuries that lead to lost time, workers compensation claims, low morale, high turnover, and poor output.
By providing your employees with the equipment to get their jobs done safely, and to work more comfortably you are improving your business all-around.
Have questions? Need help choosing the proper equipment? Let Production Automation help, we can be reached Monday through Friday at 888-903-0333 or by email at [email protected].
