Manual Labor Isn’t Just a Cost It’s a Risk You Can Engineer Away
Historically, heavy industry has simply treated manual labor as an unavoidable constant. Workers shovel spilled material, walk 1000’s of miles per year on inspection rounds, tension scrapers by hand, and clear blockages near moving equipment. While these tasks may be considered ‘normal’ and even ‘quite easy’ to some, we dramatically under-appreciate how physically & mentally demanding they are, how prone to human error they are, and how much long-term organ and joint damage is being caused to our colleagues.
Find Your Hidden Labor Sinks First
First, you need to understand how much labor you’re devoting to cleaning in and around your conveyors and what tasks are the most repetitive and potentially injurious. Most safety, health, and environment management in your company maintain records of incidents, types of incidents, and where they occurred that can tell you where to focus first. To that, add tracking how many hours your team spent on tasks that include words like recurring, consistent, constant, and ongoing. That’s a rough guide to where the risk is highest (but not the only risk).
Engineer Carryback Out of the System
Carryback is what’s left on the belt after the discharge and it travels back on the return side. It accumulates on return idlers. It falls to the floor. And somebody goes and has to get it, again, and again, and again. And they’re working within as little as 18 inches of something moving.
The solution isn’t a better shovel. The goal is to prevent the carryback from forming in the first place. Primary and secondary scrapers, mounted near the head pulley, effectively remove material at the discharge, before it has a chance to travel back under the belt. Tungsten carbide blades stay sharp much longer than standard urethane blades, meaning fewer manual blade changes over the life of the system.
Effective conveyor belt cleaning systems don’t just eliminate what employees have to move, but also eliminate the need for employees to be in that dangerous, hard-to-reach area in the first place. That’s not a maintenance activity. That’s an engineered control.
Contain Fugitive Material at the Transfer Point
Transfer points are the locations in the conveyor system where the product or material is transferred from one belt to another, changing direction, or sending the product down a chute. These are also the areas where a disproportionate number of messes and material escape issues occur.
Material cost is directly related to production in the transfer point areas of conveyors. With traditional conveyor skirting systems, incorrect conveyor belt tracking, the motor can wear itself out. This in turn puts unnecessary and costly demands on the entire system. Skirt system issues also generate unwanted downtime costs, added maintenance expenditures, excessive clean-up costs, and safety risks.
The right skirt design is key. Too often the skirting and sealing system remains an afterthought but there are very positive gains when everything is taken into consideration. The proper solution can offset cost overruns, related equipment damage, worker injuries, and even penalties.
Shift From Inspection Rounds to Condition-Based Monitoring
When sensors were costly and unreliable, manual inspection rounds were an acceptable practice. Fast forward to today, and that is no longer the case. Thermal and vibration sensors installed on critical conveyor components, idlers, pulleys, and drives, can help a maintenance team flag developing problems before they affect equipment performance or cause failure. And all that can be accomplished without the need for anyone physically be on the equipment.
Condition-based monitoring doesn’t take the maintenance team out of the picture. It just reorients them. Instead of walking a conveyor route and seeing a potential problem, an alert is seen when a specific alert is triggered, with a specific part in the hand. Average time of repair declines. Unplanned downtimes reduce. And while we’re at it, less time is spent around a potentially hazardous operation conducting routine checks.
The Zero-Access Philosophy as a Design Standard
All of these approaches stem from a common philosophy; human access to hazardous areas should be seen as a design failure rather than a necessary step. If a worker has to adjust the tension of a scraper every two weeks as the system does not maintain an adjustment; that is not wear and tear, that is a design flaw. There is a better way.
Self-adjusting mechanical cleaning systems, totally sealed transfer points, automated monitoring, and correctly engineered, with low-maintenance carryback controls all reduce the human-entry necessity into dirty, dangerous, and confined areas. The safety risk assessments at most sites already highlight these areas. All that is needed now is to do something about it, via engineering rather than procedure.
The sites that will maintain labor, keep insurance in check, and keep production steady, are the ones that see manual intervention as a symptom to be investigated, not just a fact to be managed.