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Industrial Manufacturing Health and Safety Challenges

Industrial Manufacturing Health and Safety Challenges
Health and safety in industrial manufacturing are highly important to protect the working conditions and overall health of operators and staff in the workplace, especially on the factory floor and other places of high risk.

With 85 years’ experience, Russell Finex has the longevity and knowledge to ensure that operator health and safety is protected. With a range of innovative sieves, separators, and filters, each unit can be adapted and designed specifically to meet your industry’s requirements – from food and beverage to pharmaceutical – to mitigate any risk and comply with a variety of health and safety standards.

What are the common risks?

  • Mechanical failures (e.g. from machinery or the factory)
  • Lack of knowledge leads to increased human errors
  • Explosive or hazardous chemicals
  • Machines that contain moving parts
  • Fire (e.g. handling flammable materials)
  • Occupational health risks (e.g. working at height and noise)

Many of these risks can be mitigated through simple safeguarding measures and regulations. However, it is important to identify these risks to effectively combat them.

How do you improve operator safety?

  1. Provide product training and the right equipment

One key way to improve operator safety is by providing regular and thorough product training. A lack of knowledge can cause accidents, and so educating your operators on the machinery is crucial. This helps to reduce the likelihood and accidents and alert them to the potential risks caused by operating and using the machines.

Another way is that making sure the right equipment is selected for the right application. For example, utilizing a completely enclosed screener or sieve for pharmaceutical powders will help to reduce the risk of hazardous chemical exposure. Or when processing hot liquids, such as oil, using a self-cleaning fully enclosed filtration systems – like the Self-Cleaning Russell Eco Filter® – lowers to risk to operators.

  1. Assess workplace risks

Assessing your workplace safety by carrying out a safety and risk assessment is also another way to improve operator safety. This is the best practice to use to ensure businesses are given a picture of how to improve and safeguard their workforce against potential risks. Risk assessment practice should deal with the following questions:

  • What are the potential risks of routine operations?
  • Considering the potential hazards, how many employees could this affect?
  • Is there data that can help manufacturers judge the likelihood of industrial accidents?

Regulations

Regulations should be adhered to when assessing health and safety in the workplace. Making certain that machines are compliant with industry standards, which will differ depending on the industry or application, is important to ensure any risk to the end product is limited.

ATEX, DSEAR, and OEL

Machines that process hazardous chemicals or exist in a potentially explosive atmosphere need to be compliant with the appropriate standards and directives such as DSEAR and ATEX. This is a high priority in industries such as the pharmaceutical industry, where the processing of potentially explosive and hazardous powders is a common occurrence.

Potential exposure risks to harmful powders also need to be considered when assessing operator safety. This is a risk that is monitored by the occupational exposure limit (OEL), a limit that establishes the safe levels of exposure limits on a variety of different materials. The Russell Compact Airlock Sieve™ is specifically designed with a patented TLI (Twist, Lock and Inflate) pneumatic clamping system, providing validated OEL 5 containment and reducing dust and powders potentially released into the surrounding atmosphere.

Russell Finex provides businesses with comprehensive documentation to ensure validation processes are kept to a minimum. All equipment from Russell Finex is manufactured to the highest of standards, as well as providing certification for machines that extensively operate in hazardous environments (such as ATEX or IECEX).

Critical Control Points (CCP) and HACCP

In the food and beverage industry regulations to minimize contamination risk are of the utmost importance, to protect the quality of the product. Moreover, due to the nature of some products – such as milk powder, flour, or chocolate – there are increasingly strict Manual Handling Operation regulations to mitigate risk to the operator.

Systems like HACCP are utilized to identify and mitigate hazards and critical control points, done to protect products and operators. The Russell Compact 3in1 Sieve™ is an example of this sieving unit, designed specifically to meet HACCP requirements within the food industry when ingredients such as flour or sugar are debagged into a food processing line.

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Established in 1934, Russell Finex has enjoyed 85 steady years of successful growth to become an international group employing over 250 direct employees with annual sales exceeding £40 million ($54m). As a worldwide leader in...

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