Slips, trips and falls are the most common cause of injury in the workplace. Nearly 37.5 million falls worldwide require medical attention each year.
- Each year an estimated 424,000 people die from falls globally.
- Falls are the second leading cause of accidental or unintentional deaths from injury worldwide.
Can falls be prevented?
In most cases: yes. Simply install an appropriate safety floor.
Contaminants
Wet and dry contaminants on flooring create a film that prevents contact between a shoe and the floor which can result in a slip or fall.
A wet film only needs to be 1-2 µm thick to prevent complete contact between a shoe and the flooring: that’s about one tenth the thickness of a human hair.
Dry contaminants such as dust and flour can act like millions of tiny ball bearings, which can also result in a slip or fall.
Safety flooring works by incorporating aggregates into a wear layer. When these aggregates are sufficient in number and quality, they can penetrate the wet film to provide contact with the shoe, or sit proud to prevent the ball bearing effect of dry contaminants.
Not all contaminants pose the same level of risk, nor are they always present. Your risk level will vary depending on the nature of the contaminants and whether they are continuously present. Our flooring solutions have been developed to match real-world scenarios so you can match your risk to our solutions.
Sustained slip resistance
There’s a big difference between ‘slip resistance’ and ‘sustained slip resistance’.
‘Sustained slip resistance’ protects people from slips and falls for the lifetime of the flooring.
But not all safety flooring on the market offers slip resistance for its declared lifetime. We know this because external, independent laboratory tests prove it.
At the moment there’s no legal requirement for sustained slip resistance for safety flooring, or even an agreed industry standard on how to measure it.
So some products can be manufactured with a thin coating or emboss that qualifies them as a safety flooring when newly made in the factory, but that coating can wear away and leave users vulnerable.
Altro safety flooring is tough. We manufacture using combinations of silicon carbide, quartz and aluminium oxide throughout the entire wear layer, so that as the flooring is used, it keeps delivering the same level of slip resistance, and confidence for the lifetime of your installation.
One in a million
When safety flooring with a lifetime sustained slip resistance of Pendulum Test Value (PTV) ≥ 36 is installed, the risk of anyone slipping is just one in a million. If a different type of flooring is used, the flooring could lose its slip resistance and over time the odds of someone slipping could be as high as one in two. That’s a big difference.
Our safety flooring solutions all offer our one in a million slip risk for life. Look for the one in a million logo and lifetime slip resistance logos for the confidence of sustained slip resistance guaranteed.
Setting the standards
We go beyond current requirements and provide sustained slip resistance for the lifetime of the flooring on all our safety flooring ranges.
We work with leading international test houses and also invest in additional tests to make sure our products consistently deliver to the highest standards.
As the inventors of safety flooring, we have an established pedigree in championing the need for safety. This is why we’re campaigning for responsible information on sustained slip resistance to indicate how long flooring will maintain its slip resistance performance.
To show how thorough we are, we clearly state the number of years you can expect Altro safety flooring to provide sustained slip resistance. Look for the sustained slip resistance logo on those products which provide it.
We strongly recommend that you check the sustained slip resistance of any safety flooring with the manufacturer to make sure you use the most effective product for each area. We firmly believe in sustained slip resistance and always recommend flooring which will keep you safe in those areas with a very high or high slip risk.