Posted By Giles Davis
Dear all,

Following the recent thread, which discussed the prosecution of a Designer under CDM due to specifying concrete blocks of 36 kilos, can anyone offer advice on the following;

Our company supplies chemicals in 25 litre UN approved HDPE drums. Some of the product blends have specific gravities of up to 1.25 and maybe a bit more, which results in the 25 litres weighing, for example, 32 kilos.

I have been trying to persuade our company to sell these products in lots of 25 kilos for two reasons.

a) to reduce the likelihood of manual handling injuries to both our employees and client employees.

b) to enable greater control of stock control as currently we buy in kilos and sell in litres.

I am met with opposition due to the fact we will be therefore selling less product per drum if we sell in 25-kilo lots and also using more packaging. A colleague also thinks that if we label the drums, ‘Caution – Heavy Container’ for example, we will be legally covered.

We do not sell many of our products in 25 litre containers anymore due to the use of IBC’s and our own ‘Hands Free’ delivery system. I therefore feel that by selling in 25 litres and therefore in weights of up to 32 kilos we are not doing all that is reasonably practicable to protect persons.

I would be pleased to read comments form everyone, particularly those with similar activities.

Regards

Giles

Posted By Michael Nixon
In my last company (quite large) I tried to persuade suppliers to reduce the weight of chemicals in containers but the usual responses were:
It will cost you more
We cannot change as that is how they come from our supplier
Nobody else has asked so tough luck

plus a variety of other excuses.

However if our customers said they only wanted 15k in a 25l bucket then they got it. We usually bent over backwards so as not to upset the customer and ended uo with a myriad of container sizes and shapes.

Two products that used to cause me great concern were caustic soda and glycerine. A standard 200l or 45 gallon plastic barrel could contain up to 280k. Imagine trying to move that manually - do not say you should not move barrels by hand as in some cases it is impossible not to, there are specialist techniques like churning to assist.

Moving up to IBC's these could weigh 1400k often too much for a standard FLT. Did the suppliers care? No not one iota. Safety was not their concern they just had to sell the product for the best profit margin.


Thus it is nice to hear a supplier questioning their size/weight policy. Keep up the pressure then there will be a slim chance of safety overriding commerce or is this wishful thinking?