Health and Safety – Machine Guarding Assessments, The Ardagh Group (formerly Saint Gobain), Various Locations

SCS Engineers provides machine-specific hazard evaluations in conjunction with current operations and site-specific settings of the equipment at each of The Ardagh Group’s sites.

The machine-guarding hazard evaluations are specific to individual types of equipment at each site with the exception of IS machines. Instructions for safely operating, maintaining, and repairing specific pieces of equipment are vital to protect employees in the workplace. Machine guarding is an essential part of the controls used to protect against worker injuries. Further, the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) and state agencies have rules for minimum machine guarding. The federal rules are published in 29 CFR 1910 Subpart O.

The scope of work for each site is intended to address the hazards associated with the equipment used in the manufacturing process, to inventory machine guarding that is currently in place to prevent injury, and to identify areas where additional machine guarding is necessary.

The equipment is evaluated to determine current guarding and the need for additional guarding for hazards associated with normal operations, cleaning, maintenance and repair.

SCS evaluates each piece of equipment for issues such as the following:

• Do the safeguards provided meet the minimum OSHA requirements?
• Do the safeguards provide reasonable protection for workers’ hands, arms, and other body parts, and from making contact with dangerous moving parts?
• Are the safeguards firmly secured and not easily removable?
• Do the safeguards provide reasonable assurance that no object will fall into the moving parts?
• Do the safeguards permit safe, comfortable, and relatively easy operation of the machine?
• Can the machine be oiled without removing the safeguard?
• Is there a system for shutting down the machinery before safeguards are removed?
• Is there evidence that the safeguards have been tampered with or removed?

We complete a hazard assessment form for production equipment and provide a numerical hazard ranking value. These tools follow ANSI B-11 guidance documents and are utilized to determine priorities within each facility. Following each site inspections, SCS provides a written summary report of the findings to the client. Each summary report includes an inventory of equipment and their associated processes, current safeguards in place, current safeguard deficiencies, other evident hazards and recommended improvements.