Is Slip Resistant Safety Flooring Right for Your Business?
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Commercial and industrial workplaces can be dangerous enough without having to worry about slipping over. Nobody wants to be sliding around while working with heavy machinery, dangerous equipment or chemicals.
But even though more workplaces are taking measures to prevent slipping, slips, trips and falls still makeup 17.3% of all workplace injuries! According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, it’s the second most common cause of injury, right behind ‘Lifting, pushing, pulling and bending’.
In FY 2021-2022, that was 86,032 people that were injured in their workplace. Thankfully, there is a solution for preventing slipping in workplaces: Slip Resistant Safety Flooring.
Slip resistant safety flooring is everywhere, and for good reason! Beyond just being good practice, it’s a legal requirement, according to the Building Code of Australia (BCA) to have slip resistant surfaces in emergency access areas and egress.
Slip resistant safety flooring is also one of the easiest ways to meet your Work Health and Safety duty of care requirements (OHS Act 2004) and stay legally compliant when building a commercial or industrial space.
In fact, for many businesses, a non-slip floor has been the only thing standing between them and a serious Slip and Fall liability claim.
With properly installed slip resistant flooring, you don’t only have to rely on people doing the right thing to reduce injury risk. Instead, the floor does a lot of the hard work, flattening out uneven surfaces, adding texture for grip, and even making it easy to clean up spills.
At Safecoat, we specialise in lip resistant commercial epoxy floors. Unlike a number of other flooring options, epoxy is easy to install and highly durable. And unlike anti-slip mats, floor panels and tiles, with the correct installation it can last as long as 20 years or more.
With the right preparation, epoxy flooring can be installed over almost any concrete surface, quickly transforming uneven, unstable floors into pristine surfaces that can handle even the toughest of jobs.
Here’s why we love slip resistant epoxy flooring:
Not all epoxy flooring is slip-resistant. Epoxy is made slip resistant by adding a coating on top, adding a grit helps shoes, tires and other surfaces grip better.
Here’s how it works:
The end result is epoxy slip resistant safety flooring with a clear, bumpy surface. From a distance, it’ll look like there’s nothing there. But when touching or walking on it, you’ll really feel the difference.
Capitol Transport didn’t want to take any chances with safety for their new warehouse parking space, and we agreed.
We picked out Flowcrete Flowcoat OP for their floors, a 3-coat commercial epoxy floors system that balances durability, impact resistance and visual quality. Then we applied a slip resistant coating to the entire floor.
More specifically, we coated it with #60 Aluminium Oxide, a gritty, aluminium-based powder. At 60 grit, it gives any epoxy floor a durable textured coating that stops most slipping and sliding. Plus, the increased grit size ensures it will stand up to the test of time and maintain durability for years and years to come.
Combined with some clever design in the floor’s construction, such as small channels and light sloping to drain any water away quickly, and you’ve got a Slip Resistant floor that’ll stand up to anything you can throw at it.
This facility achieved the highest non-slip standards (P5 rating) across all ramps and walkways, making it the safest possible flooring for employees, customers, and general business operations.
While non-slip flooring is easy to maintain, it’s not maintenance free. Dirt, dust, grime and other contaminants can sit on the surface, reducing its anti-slip properties. Which is why proper cleaning, inspections and the occasional repairs are essential to ensure your flooring stays slip-resistant.
Thankfully, proper cleaning is easy to do. Just like any floor, a good sweep, vacuum, and mop with a soft cleaning solution will do the job. If you have access to proper drainage, you can even spray down the floor with a hose or pressure washer.
Safecoat also offers professional inspection and maintenance services to help you keep your slip resistant safety flooring in pristine condition all year round.
Choosing the right flooring based on workplace conditions is incredibly important. There’s a variety of factors to consider, such as resistance to chemicals, insulation, and hygiene requirements, and each will determine what kind of flooring is right for you.
If your workplace faces hazards such as:
Then, you’ll definitely benefit from slip resistant flooring.
At Safecoat, we use Worksafe Victoria’s slips, trips and falls checklist to assess every job site before working. It’s a complete guide to falls prevention, covering assessment of risks in your workplace, the possible solutions, and how to implement those solutions.
It’s one of our best tools when assessing new jobs, but we’re not going to gatekeep. You can use the checklist yourself to see exactly how your workplace stacks up and how to improve safety.
The official checklist is massive, totalling 11 pages of checkboxes, advice and guidance. Which is why we’ve created a summarised version of the checklist to help you get started, complete with practical tips!
It covers:
Get in touch today for your free quote and consultation by calling or clicking “Get a Quote”.
If you’re interested in learning more, have a chat with one of our experts. It’s completely free, and they’ll provide you with all the information you need to decide whether slip resistant epoxy flooring is right for you.
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