Almost 33 percent of all workplace injuries are musculoskeletal ones. These injuries often occur from lifting and moving heavy loads as part of the worker’s job. These strenuous tasks can result in long-term musculoskeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, muscle strains, and tendinitis.
To prevent workplace injuries and prioritize your workers’ health and safety, it is essential that your workplace minimizes the number of heavy items employees must carry. Conveyors can greatly decrease the need for this kind of labor and increase warehouse ergonomics—here’s how.
Ergonomic Conveyor Design
To maximize the ergonomics of your conveyor systems, you must install them intentionally. Here are a few factors you should consider.
First, ensure the work surface height is at a comfortable position for the average person’s height. Work surface height refers to the distance from the belt surface to the floor. Workers should also not need to reach to access the moving loads. Items should be easily accessible without requiring bending or stretching.
In addition to reducing physical strain, these modifications also increase the safety of working with conveyors. Preventing workers from leaning over the conveyors minimizes the risk of the conveyor catching hair or loose clothing.
Moving Items Between Levels
Rather than relying on workers to carry items up or down stairs or even into elevators with aids like straps or hand trucks, install conveyors to do the job. Spirals and chutes work well to deliver items from upper levels to the ground floor while requiring minimal space. Incline conveyors efficiently move cargo both up and down levels.
Benefits of Portable Conveyors
Portable conveyors make prioritizing worker safety outside the warehouse proper much easier. Rather than requiring workers to load heavy cargo into trucks entirely by hand, use a portable conveyor to do the bulk of the labor.
You can position portable conveyors halfway into the truck, where a single individual can then remove cargo from the conveyor and load it into the truck. This minimizes the time a worker will need to manually handle the cargo, lowering their risk of injury.
Portable conveyors have infinite uses, increasing warehouse ergonomics even outside the physical building. Bring portable conveyors to any job site or loading docks to keep your workplace’s best practices consistent everywhere.
An excellent example of a high-quality portable conveyor is our portable concrete conveyor. Our RM series conveyors are just one example of the top-of-the-line conveyors we manufacture at Redline Systems.
