The Future of Powder Handling Health & Safety: Robotics Takes the Lead
Health and safety are always top priorities in manufacturing, but when it comes to handling powders and dust, the risks can be particularly challenging to manage. Operators must contend with the potential health risks associated with powders and dust, and finding simple and cost-effective solutions to mitigate these risks can be a major challenge.
Fortunately, robotics is emerging as a game-changer in powder handling safety. By automating the handling of powders and dust, robotics can help protect operators from exposure to hazardous materials and improve overall safety in the workplace. With robotics, manufacturers can reduce the risks associated with powder handling, while also improving efficiency and productivity.
The perils of powders
Powder ingredients can be difficult for operators to work with safely. Any fine powder in any industry, will create dust that could have a negative impact on operator health as the actions taken with the powders, from sieving and weighing to conveying and blending, all generate dust as the product is moved from one place to another.
Flour dust in particular is labelled a hazardous substance as defined by the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) Regulations 2002, because repeated and long-term exposure can cause occupational asthma and respiratory irritation, such as rhinitis, as well as skin conditions like dermatitis. There are many steps that must be taken to reduce the amount of dust people breathe in to the lowest level reasonably practicable, but the measures are not always correctly interpreted as we saw from the £159,000 fine handed to a bakery in 2018 that failed to protect its staff.
The risk of working around these powders in bakeries is stark. While the overall incidence rate of occupational asthma has decreased since 1999, the rate of new cases amongst bakers as reported by occupational physicians is now the highest of any occupation in any industry, according to the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK. So what are the measures that bakeries can take to protect operators, and are they sufficient?
Rising regulation
The HSE in the UK requires manufacturers to avoid exposing their employees to dust, or where not practical, to adequately control exposure. The Workplace Exposure Limit (WEL) of flour dust is 10mg/m3 (averaged over 8 hours) for long-term exposure and 30mg/m3 (averaged over 15 minutes) for short-term exposure. Yet the HSE believes that 2mg/m3 dust in the air for staff working in the weighing and handling of powder ingredients is possible to achieve. How, you may wonder?
HSE advises manufacturers to keep ingredient handling to a small, dedicated area with good airflow, only accessible to trained staff who open all containers carefully and scoop gently. It’s recommended that companies implement local exhaust ventilation (LEV) systems at the source of the dust, using short extraction ducts and disposing of the air in a safe place away from windows, doors and air inlets. Manufacturers should also conduct regular maintenance as well as implement alarms for blockages or failures in the extraction system. The facility should try to only use low-dust additives and single dose packets to avoid the need for weighing, as well as supplying the appropriate PPE to its workforce, or even RPE (respiratory protective equipment) in some cases, and ongoing health surveillance for your employees… The list goes on, as do the costs. The bakery that was fined in 2018 spent £232,000 on solutions to ensure compliance and protect its staff - a hefty sum that reveals the potential costs involved in the implementing the current measures.
No one would deny that these are all vital aspects of bakeries’ duty of care to its staff – no one’s health should be in danger in the workplace. Yet it doesn’t seem right that even with all of these measures, there’s still an incidence rate of 38.8 per 100,000 (not accounting for under-reporting) for bakers and confectioners who have been exposed to flour dust during the course of their work.
According to the Federation of Bakers’ publication, A Baker’s Dozen, if there is a solution out there that can help to reduce risk, it should be implemented, as can be seen on page 9:
“To comply with the regulations exposure levels should be kept not only below the WELs, but are reduced as low as reasonably practicable. In practice this means that if there is a technically achievable and cost‐effective control that reduces exposure, it must be put in place.”
Robotics to the rescue
We all know that the best way to reduce risk is to ensure that staff are not put into situations where they will encounter a hazard. That’s why the latest solution, the APRIL Robotics Ingredient Handling system is the new solution the industry has been waiting for. By using robotics to carry out the manual weighing and ingredient handling tasks, bakeries can transform their operations, achieving unmanned ingredient weighing and taking their operators away from the risk, moving into the ‘Elimination’ section of the above hierarchy of control.
With an APRIL Robotics Ingredient Handling system, the task is fully automated, also helping to mitigate the problems of social distancing that are now part of our daily life. Using robotics and advanced automation, bakers can achieve unrivalled accuracy, efficiency and allergen control. The system allows you to weigh out ingredients to an accuracy of +/- 1g every time, improving consistency of batches while reducing waste. Combining exceptional storage density with an unparalleled turndown ratio for high accuracy ingredient scaling, a robot retrieves and manages your ingredients from a network of APRIL smart containers (ASCs) as per your recipe and scales them into an ASC Blend Container. The ASCs are managed through the system, including cleaning operations, offering a reliable and repeatable unmanned operation.
Furthermore, with APRIL Robotics there is a reduced chance of cross-contamination due the dedicated ingredient containers and contact components within the APRIL Robotics Ingredient Handling system. This also offers full traceability for the product, ensuring that products are labelled accurately to reflect the contents of the product on the packaging and helping to prevent product recalls as well as protecting consumer safety.
In this way, bakeries can not only protect their operators, but also boost productivity, increase accuracy, reduce the risk of cross-contamination and safeguard consumer health.
