The benefit of having a standardized test is to be able to quantify a particular characteristic of a glove across many vendors with a minimum of subjectivity. With the enormous number of gloves now being sold, it鈥檚 a great way to narrow down your choices.
By David Miller
I have a question for you WASTE INDUSTRY veterans out there: When did you first start paying attention to glove ratings, such as cut level, and how do risk ratings on gloves affect your decision making when selecting work gloves for your team?
If you are like most industry managers, your interest in glove risk ratings has matured over the years, and you have come to rely on available ratings as an important way to filter features of the thousands of glove styles available today.
Safety suppliers, in turn, have responded by offering more technical information on the gloves they offer. As a case in point, I recently learned that one of our major glove suppliers is adding a thermal rating score to the available information listed for their winter gloves. The ratings system they have begun to use is EN 511:2006.
This piqued my curiosity to ask these questions: 1) Why adopt an EN standard? and 2) Why start doing it now? As the number at the end of the standard implies, this ratings system has been available since 2006. So why are they just now adding this information to their sell sheets, and why borrow a standard that comes to us from the EU?
Image courtesy Protective Industrial Products, Inc.
Image courtesy of Portwest GMBH.
Standards
In the domestic U.S. market, we ordinarily look to ANSI to define industry safety standards. In this case, there does not seem to be a corresponding ANSI standard to measure a glove鈥檚 ability to keep hands comfortable in the cold, so the CEN standard was chosen as the next best option.
As to why this supplier only recently started adding this information to their database? This is a response to the evolving sophistication of glove consumers. The bar is continually being raised as a matter of necessity when the market presents industry with more and more glove choices.
Some distributors have their own home-grown methods to quantify thermal insulation that are not based on any official standard. These often appear as a minimum temperature listed for a glove which you can then compare with the minimum temperature for another glove. Within that distributor鈥檚 offerings, this can be a useful reference, but the comparison with another glove from a different distributor would not be possible.
EN System
So, let鈥檚 look at the EN 511 system: This system encompasses a collection of three distinct tests performed on the glove and is represented by a three-digit code. The tests, in order, measure Convective Cold Resistance, Contact Cold Resistance, and Water Permeability.
In plain terms, these ratings represent the following:
鈥� Convective Cold鈥擳he ability to insulate your hands from the ambient cold. This will tell you how effectively these gloves keep your hands from getting cold in winter conditions. This is rated on a scale of 0 to 4, with 4 being the highest level of protection.
鈥� Contact Cold鈥擳he ability to insulate your hands from contact with a cold object. This measures the ability of the glove to insulate your hand from cold things you grab, which will not always correlate with the first rating. It is useful to know if your work involves frequent handling of frozen things. This is rated on a scale of 0 to 4, with 4 being the highest level of protection.
鈥� Water Permeability鈥擶ater resistance. This will not be an important metric if you are never in contact with snow, ice, or water, but highly significant for the comfort of those workers in the outdoor elements since water infiltration can dramatically reduce the thermal properties of a glove. This is a pass/fail rating: If any water permeates the glove during the 30-minute test, it is counted as a fail and scores 鈥�0鈥� in the last position; 1 means it is reliably waterproof for at least 30 minutes.
The rating is displayed with an icon as shown below:
The 3-digit code appears underneath the icon. The code shows each individual rating as shown in Chart 1. If an 鈥淴鈥� appears in any position in the code, it serves as a placeholder for a test rating that is not available. The 鈥淴鈥� will appear quite often in the water permeability test slot when the glove is not constructed with water resistance in mind.
Image courtesy of HUB Industrial Supply.
Using Ratings to Narrow Choices
The methodology behind each test is available online, but I assume that most of you reading this will be less interested in how the tests are performed than in how to interpret the scores. The benefit of having a standardized test is to be able to quantify a particular characteristic of a glove across many vendors with a minimum of subjectivity. With the enormous number of gloves now being sold, it鈥檚 a great way to narrow down your choices. | WA
David Miller is Manager of Strategic Accounts for HUB Industrial Supply. He is a Certified Safety Professional and collaborates with managers to effectively implement and manage PPE and MRO programs in the waste industry. He may be reached at [email protected]. HUB Industrial Supply is an Applied MSSSM company.