How can the right flooring material help facility managers prevent or reduce the number of slip accidents in the workforce?
Thousands of injuries are sustained from slips or trips in the workplace every year, and slip risks are often higher in the food and beverage industries than other environments, according to floor and wall coating solutions company Flowcrete Australia.
The reason, the company’s managing director, Sean Tinsley says, is mainly because of wet or greasy floors that have been subject to spillage as well as clean-up or washdown processes.
“Facility managers must therefore consider the specification of flooring materials in order to prevent or, at the very least, reduce the number of slip accidents,” Tinsley says.
Avoiding wet contamination is preferable, but wet or greasy floors cannot always be circumvented, so the use of a surface with an adequate positively textured, anti-slip profile is critical.
Two important factors should be addressed when assessing a floor’s potential slip risk – the coefficient of friction (CoF) and surface roughness.
Tinsley says seamless polyurethane flooring materials are popular in the food and beverage sector for this reason.
“Textured aggregates, either incorporated into the polyurethane matrix or broadcast into the surface before cure, create a surface roughness capable of maintaining a sufficient slip resistance performance even in wet conditions,” Tinsley says.
Seamless polyurethane flooring offers other advantages including high durability, excellent thermal shock resistance and excellent resistance to chemical abuse from a number of corrosive contaminants.
The use of antimicrobial additives, which are homogenously mixed within the polyurethane resin, can also assist with microbiological contamination strategies.
The Flowfresh antimicrobial polyurethane flooring range, for instance, contains Polygiene – a natural silver-based antimicrobial additive that destroys up to 99.9 per cent of surface bacteria, Tinsley says.
The system is available with adjustable anti-slip profile to offer a safe, hygienic platform for the environment underfoot.
