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Waste management requires durable containers made with high-quality, low-maintenance materials, particularly in industrial and commercial settings. Plastic garbage bins have numerous advantages over metal: They’re easy to sanitize, lightweight, and maneuverable. They’re also much quieter than all-steel dumpsters, which is an essential consideration if your facility is near a residential area.

Employers have a responsibility to provide workers with suitable protection from chemicals and toxic substances. Fortunately, with proper planning, fulfilling that responsibility can be a fairly straightforward process.

Oils can make a workplace unsafe by creating slip hazards. Many oils are also highly flammable, so spills need to be addressed as soon as they occur. By maintaining a steady stock of oil-specific cleanup supplies, businesses can comply with OSHA requirements while managers enjoy peace of mind.

Face shields (or vision protective shields) are simple barriers used to prevent injuries from splashing fluids, flying objects, and some infectious materials. They’re a useful component of a well-structured safety plan, and they can assist with OSHA compliance in certain circumstances. To use them effectively, however, it’s helpful to know what they can and can’t do.

Battery watering is a critical part of lift truck maintenance. When batteries aren’t watered regularly, they can lose a significant portion of their capacity — we’ve explained why this occurs in other articles, but the takeaway is clear: Regular watering solves the problem, which is why every battery room needs to incorporate fluid checks into regular maintenance schedules.

Industrial ergonomics is the key to a safer, more productive workplace. To understand why, consider a common class of injury in manufacturing and warehousing operations. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are traumatic injuries that can cause lifetime-lasting damage to a person’s body. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), MSDs can affect muscles, nerves, blood vessels, ligaments and tendons, and are often caused by work-related tasks such as:

If you want to create a sustainable park waste management system, take your cues from the National Park Service. Across all 411 national parks, the NPS has pledged to keep at least half of all waste out of landfills (as of 2018, they were nearly there, with a 40-percent diversion rate). To reach that 50-percent diversion threshold, the NPS encourages parks to separate post-use materials into multiple streams: reuse, recycling, composting, and — when all else fails — landfills.

The pandemic brought personal protective equipment (PPE) into national focus, but employers in warehousing, logistics and other industries have long understood the importance of proper PPE outfitting. Where protective equipment is necessary, OSHA generally requires employers to provide it — and most employers understand that PPE is well worth the investment, since safety is always a crucial priority.

The warehousing and storage industry employed well over a million people in 2019. More than 300,000 of those employees were manual material handlers, the largest occupation of any in the sector. (By contrast, there were only 12,500 managers and fewer than 200,000 industrial truck operators.) These statistics illustrate the central role manual material handling continues to occupy in our global logistics systems.

Bulk waste management requires bulk material handling equipment. If your facility handles post-use materials on a large scale, you need mechanical help to safely transport, lift, and empty bins. This waste-handling equipment may include any or all of the following: