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According to OSHA, warehouses have a higher fatal injury rate than the national average for all industries. Employers have a responsibility to provide a safe working environment for the 145,000 American adults employed in more than 7,000 warehouses — but each year, avoidable warehouse accidents continue to occur.

Industrial operations invest heavily in material handling equipment to move materials in, around, and out of facilities. But one material tends to get overlooked: Waste. Neglecting waste management infrastructure can lead to measurable inefficiencies, as employees struggle to drag heavy trash cans to dumpsters. Without the right equipment, emptying the trash can even lead to injuries.

Chemical spill emergencies can endanger workers and ruin equipment, and when working with hazardous materials, every employer needs an appropriate disaster response strategy. When spills occur, workers need fast access to personal protective equipment (PPE), loose sorbents, and absorbent pads and pillows.

On average, schools generate 4.7 pounds of waste per person per day. The average public school enrollment is 527 students — do the math, and schools produce about 12,385 pounds of waste per week.

Add wheels to a bin and you have a cart—and virtually every workplace uses one or both of these containers.

Conduit isn’t the easiest material to deal with. Electrical wholesalers may struggle to store, move, package, and organize the many different types of conduit they carry. The simplest way to store conduit is to leave bundles lying around the floor — but that leads to confusion, inefficiency, and, worst of all, potential safety issues.

>Do truck drivers have a responsibility to address hazardous material spills? The short answer is “yes,” but the extent of the spill is an important factor.

Before you can store food products in the U.S., you have to meet a long list of rules enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This regulatory agency oversees the nation’s food supply chain, from production to transportation to storage, all the way up to the consumer’s table. You can consider the food-grade warehouse a storage facility that complies with all the standards and regulations required by the FDA, state, and municipal health authorities — but while local rules may differ from one place to another, FDA regulations cover every facility.

Lift truck forks aren’t just for grabbing pallets. Fleet owners use any number of fork attachments for specialized jobs, whether that’s lifting huge cable reels or dumping bins. But when those fork attachments are designed to lift people rather than objects, you must be certain that the tool matches the job. Use a forklift personnel lift outside of its intended purpose, and you create a serious health and safety hazard.

Construction electricians may spend up to half the day simply moving materials. That’s according to a University of Michigan productivity report, which found that 40 to 50 percent of construction work time is spent on material handling. Conduit is certainly a big part of the challenge — especially when you work with rigid conduit, which typically comes in 10-foot lengths, and can get extremely heavy when bundled.