Composites Eliminate Manual Handling Health and Safety Risks

Health and safety in today’s workplace are becoming an ever increasing concern with manual handling accounting for over a third of all workplace injuries. [HSE] The majority of these injuries are caused by the handling of loads. HSE and NHS have comprehensive advice to prevent manual handling injuries, most of which relate to safe lifting technique and practices. Unfortunately, a number of everyday activities in workplaces don’t allow for these to be put into practice. A leading example is removing and replacing traditional access covers.

Composites Offer Light Safe Alternative

We are fighting to help reduce these dangers with a highly engineered composite solution: FRP GRP access covers, typically weighing in at one-third of traditional covers. While this dramatically reduces the risk of manual handling injuries, we wanted to find a way to eliminate them altogether. What resulted was an ergonomically designed lifting handle, allowing users to safely remove and replace the covers, while keeping the load close to the waist and avoiding stooping or bending their back.

We are seeing dramatic growth in the number of industries reducing their health and safety risks using composites, both for new build facilities where our covers are specified, and existing facilities retrofitting a custom cover to replace the existing.

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