I am looking at the the Product Safety for one of our products and have identified that the contents of one of our developed backpack toolkits (developed before I started at the company) is fairly heavy and wondered if there was guidance for this. I have seen the manaual handling charts for front based lifting, but was wondering if a similar one existed for the back? Thanks in advance

Thanks for the advice :-)

You might want to ask the post office on this one. Some years ago a substantial claim led to the post office identifying weights for Post bags. The problem is with this under the manual handling regs guidance is 4(1)(b)(i) Page 19 Individual capability. This in my opinion restricts the ability to specify weights. In the guidance, their is a complete misunderstanding regarding the picture of a man and a woman with KG weights in relation to body. Most people think that this is specifying weights you can lift. Actually its specifying sample weights with the ratio weight applied depending on position of object in relation to the Body. In other words the further the object is away from a central body point the greater the pressure (leverage / Muscle pressure) and therefore if 10kg is the weight of the object at the central body point = X pressure etc then the same pressure is exerted with a weight of 3 KG at say arms length at shoulder height.