GLAD 2026
GLAD TO BE OF SERVICE
This year’s Global Lifting Awareness Day (GLAD), powered by LEEA, saw its members and supporting industry stakeholders come together to celebrate the theme: ‘Not all lifting equipment is created equal.’ Hoist speaks to Matt Barber, director of membership, LEEA, to find out more.
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Under this year’s theme, GLAD will encourage the industry to interrogate their lifting equipment purchases better.
he return of the Global Lifting Awareness Day (GLAD) on Thursday 2 July 2026 saw the theme: ‘Not all lifting equipment is
created equal.’ GLAD is a widely celebrated day where manufacturers, suppliers and end users are among those that share material that promotes safe and high-quality load lifting. The seventh staging of the event by LEEA, its members and supporting industry stakeholders, will culminate in the publication of a guidance document that procurement professionals can use to source lifting equipment. Furthermore, LEEA directs autonomous yearly campaigns offering valuable industry insight in harmony with its ambitious core vision of height safety and lifting sectors totally devoid of workplace accidents, injuries and fatalities. It also continuously advances its broader overarching mission to inform, guide and
empower global stakeholders so that best practice becomes a routine daily action across all operations. This current year relies heavily on an extensive educational programme designed specifically to assist modern businesses in defining their technical products accurately and purchasing them intelligently. Ahead of this year’s GLAD event, the trade association actively gathered completed survey responses from key stakeholders involved in critical procurement decision-making, while a comprehensive fresh white paper steadily takes shape for its official public release during the upcoming GLAD proceedings. Centred firmly on the official GLAD theme for this year, LEEA, which currently represents member organisations across more than 80 nations worldwide, maintains a clear dual focus for its international spring polling campaign, placing equipment vendors and commercial purchasing decision-makers right at the very heart of this comprehensive research study. The widely distributed questionnaire emphasises that the single most consequential decision in any industrial lifting operation always occurs well before any physical load is ever raised – right at the initial point of purchase.
Essential lifting hardware and safety equipment
are routinely bought without adequate grade details, environmental limitations, operating constraints or specific duty rating data needed to establish whether a unit is truly appropriate for the exact application it will be used in. Whenever critical procurement choices rely purely on basic nominal load capacity alone, the dangerous disparity between what official documentation states and what real-world operational demands actually require is precisely where substantial safety risk resides.
Can you tell us about LEEA and the importance of GLAD? Matt Barber: LEEA, the Lifting Equipment Engineers Association, is the leading representative body for the global lifting industry, supporting members around the world through standards, training, qualifications
36 | July/August 2026 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
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