According to the U.S. Department of Labor, injuries to hands accounted for nearly 25 percent of all lost-time industrial injuries - a total of 110,000 annually. Seventy percent of those injuries resulted when an employee was not wearing safety gloves, while the other 30 percent of hand injuries occurred while an employee was wearing the wrong kind of gloves.

As the global demand for single-use gloves increases, and personnel restrictions have decreased factory production, there will be an inevitable shortage of nitrile and latex gloves. To address this, SW® recommends that we immediately begin to reserve nitrile and latex gloves for frontline mission-critical workers and offer thermoplastic extruded (TPE) and vinyl gloves as alternatives to the general population.

As a new decade rolls into our world, will there be any new significant developments in safety, particularly in hand protection that will provide an even safer work environment than the past decade?

We tend to think of impact work gloves as something you see on oil rigs or construction sites, where heavy duty impacts and blows are common. But almost any manufacturing process involves some type of rough work that can bump or bruise workers’ hands.

Prevention is a key factor for any organization seeking continual improvement in its occupational health and safety performance. In the hierarchy of controls, elimination of the hazard comes first, and the last line of defence is proper use of personal protective equipment (PPE).

There are 110,000 lost-time hand injuries annually. Hand injuries send more than one million workers to the emergency room each year. And 70 percent of workers who experience hand injuries are not wearing gloves.

In recent years, technology advancement has allowed manufacturers to create more sophisticated yarns that improve glove performance significantly. The level of cut protection can be increased by using high-performance materials, and by increasing a material's weight.