FLOOR SAFETY
TIME TO GET TOUGH
Peter Daulby, Altro’s Technical Services Manager, shares Altro’s findings after testing how safety flooring performs with ‘real world’ commercial kitchen contaminants.
The commercial kitchen can be a dangerous place. In the most recent statistics available from the Health and Safety Executive, there were more than 4,000 reportable accidents in the food services sector in one year, of which more than 700 were major incidents with 3,352 of these involving more than three days absence from the workplace.
In any workplace, slips and trips present the largest hazard measuring in at 28% of all reportable accidents, and in the commercial kitchen these risks are magnified. Contaminants
WHAT THE LAW SAYS
Employers are required to ensure the health and safety of all employees and anyone who may be affected by their work. They must assess risks, including slip and trip risks, and take action to control those risks. Floors must be suitable, in good condition and free from obstructions.
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encountered on kitchen floors create a thin film between the floor and the shoe, presenting a serious slip hazard.
Across the world safety flooring is tested in various ways. The standard Pendulum Test, which mimics a shod foot slipping across a floor resulting in a measurement of slip potential, is often used in the UK. Wet flooring that measures PTV ≥36 translates to a one in a million chance of slipping and is classed as having a low slip potential. The contaminant used for this test is water. In most areas, this is the most common contaminant, making the test robust and reliable. However, this is definitely not the case for kitchens, where clean water represents only a small proportion of the hazards a worker would encounter on a daily basis.
The reality is that kitchen workers are busy. Oil evaporates into the air and settles on the floor when it cools – requiring constant cleaning to prevent a slippery surface. Small spills like
milk or flour could cause a very real slip hazard. A busy lunch hour would mean a lot of oil and cooking ingredients on the floor, and not enough time to keep the floor clean and hazard-free at all times.
PUT TO THE TEST At Altro, we’re obsessive about safety and how our products perform, so we decided to put safety flooring to a real world test, using a variety of common contaminants found in a commercial kitchen. We tested a number of our safety flooring products using these contaminants, to gain a better understanding of real world risks in commercial kitchens, and to identify the best ways to mitigate these risks.
The test used was the standard PTV pendulum test BS7976, but instead of using only water as the test contaminant, a range of other typical kitchen contaminants were used including greasy water from washing up, vegetable oil, milk, flour and plastic wrapping.
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