With more than 1,000,000 employees in the food and beverage industry nationwide, processing facilities have more people to keep safe than ever before—especially those facilities with multiple levels. While having multiple work levels and platforms for both team members and machinery to operate on can help facilities maximize space efficiency, it can also lead to an increase in potential fall hazards.
To help your facility avoid accidents, we’ll cover the most relevant industrial safety tips for the food and beverage industry, where efficient multi-level functionality, including strategic use of modular guardrail and horizontal pivot gate technologies, can keep your worksite compliant with safety regulations and protect your team members.
Fall Safety in the Food and Beverage Industry
To ensure the smallest number of fall-related accidents, start by mitigating the most common industrial fall hazards in a food processing facility:
- A high amount of awkwardly placed machinery
- Slip hazards, such as liquid spills, equipment leaks, and melted ice
- Crowded workspaces
- Low visibility, due to steam and bulk cooking processes
- High humidity levels
- Extended periods of temperature extremes
When any of these challenges are spread out over multiple levels, it’s easy to see why modern food and beverage processing facilities are more motivated to enhance fall protection than most other industries.
To mitigate these risks, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) continually updates its fall protection standards to compel greater workplace safety. The following are the most relevant industrial safety tips for preventing falls in a multilevel food and beverage facility.
Stair and Ladder Protection
In a multi-level facility, ladder access and stair safety in the workplace are one of the most important fall protection considerations requiring your attention. Any place where workers raise or lower levels, it’s essential for your facility to maintain the following safety protocols:
- Good, consistent lighting
- Area cleared of debris, dust, oil, and other slip hazards
- Textured-grip steps, such as anti-slip tape or corrugated metal
- Gated enclosures around stair/ladder access points
The latter point is a particularly simple and effective way to deepen a culture of safety while securing one of the most common fall hazards in a multi-level facility. Along with reduced physical risk, stairway enclosures provide a psychological cue to remain mindful when changing levels, especially while carrying loads.
Further, an easy-access enclosure around stairways or ladders prevents items from accumulating and becoming serious tripping hazards. For these reasons and more, a guardrail/swing gate enclosure offers one of the most effective solutions for enhanced stair safety in the workplace.
Self-Closing Swing Gates for Enhanced Stairway/Ladder Safety
Swing gates are either required or the optimal recommendation cited in OSHA’s regulations for stairways (1910.25), ladders (1910.23), and other important fall protection scenarios:
- Removable gates as an acceptable replacement for handrails on a mobile ladder stand or platform – see 1910.23(e)(1)(v), 1910.23(e)(2)(ii), and 1910.23(e)(3)(iv)
- Ensuring enough space on a stair platform – no less than 20 (7.8 cm) to 22 in. (8.6 cm), depending on year of installation – see 1910.25(b)(5)
- Securing holes on walking-working surfaces – see 1910.28[b][3][iv]
- Impliedly, for machine guarding – see 1910.212
Both workflow and safety will improve if your horizontal pivot gate comes with a reliable self-stopping mechanism and spring-loading closure mechanism. This ensures employees can focus on their task more than the safety equipment. A self-closing feature also ensures the gate is closed any time it’s not in use.
The same is true of universal-installation mechanisms, which provide fast and reliable hand-tool mounting. With simple and efficient designs, any workplace safety device becomes more dependable and likely to function as intended during a live fall-arrest situation.
Modular Safety Gates for Multi-Level Platforms
User-friendliness and adaptability are important factors for multi-level facilities, where fall protection equipment must be versatile. In fact, industrial fall hazards can vary widely between levels. For instance:
- At upper levels, there’s a greater chance of work occurring above staff and machinery, sometimes on narrow cat walks or mezzanines. This creates a need for:
- Toe boards, to prevent tools and other small objects from falling
- Guardrails made for minimal available mounting space
- At lower levels, it’s more likely you’ll need to adapt your guardrails and swing gates to accommodate:
- More frequent interaction with both ground levels and higher levels
- Proximity to ground level operations, which are typically the most active
- More accessible elevated storage options (such as mezzanines)
- Even at ground level, fall protection is necessary around dangerous food processing equipment, including mixers, choppers, saws and packing machines
Even beyond fall protection, modular guardrails can fulfill many other safety functions, such as access control for lifting operations, industrial vehicle use and other unique working conditions. Modular railing separated with a horizontal pivot gate clearly designates that an area requires stricter authorization, training, or protocols to enter. They also provide easy installation on many different surfaces or handrails.
Selecting an Appropriate Safety Gate
Because access control and fall protection needs are inherently unique, there are many innovative guardrail and safety gate designs available. In most cases, standard bolt-on safety gates built to OSHA specifications will fulfill the majority, if not all, compliance requirements. Carbon steel is usually perfectly adequate, except in specialized use cases (such as RF-sensitive equipment, extreme work site temperatures, etc.).
In specialty cases, design requirements necessitate more specialized and adaptable safety gates built with stainless steel, aluminum, fiberglass or other materials. Custom finishing options are also available, including environmentally friendly powder coating.
Even gate widths can be customized, via universal-mount safety gates that extend up to half a foot (15.2 cm) wide. You can also use a second extendable gate for an entire foot of adjustable space. This is useful when the gate(s) must accommodate larger food processing equipment that falls under machine guarding requirements.
The Right Equipment for the Right Job
In the end, all industrial safety tips pale in comparison to knowing your fall protection duties forward and backward. This requires, at minimum, learning all OSHA and CCOHS compliance standards affecting your industry, and selecting the right fall safety devices accordingly.
If you have more questions about stair safety in the workplace or other issues related to industrial fall hazards, contact Fabenco. For years, we’ve honed our fall protection technologies to meet the highest range of regulatory standards using fully modular designs. Even if any of our stock inventory doesn’t meet your fall protection needs, we can custom design a solution for you.
