Avoiding back pain
Back Injuries - Made Easy!
If in employment and working in the packaging and despatch dept avoid being delegated to manually apply stretchfilm to pallets as this commonplace activity more or less guarantees that sooner or later you will end up with back pain. Think about it - pallet after pallet - you walk backwards in spirals around the pallets in a stooped position, crouched over a roll of stretch film, leaning backwards to apply sufficient pressure to stretch the film to enable it secure product to pallet, finishing off by holding the roll of film above shoulder level to apply top pallet protection and so increasing risk of injury to shoulders as well as back.
The muscuskeletal configuration of a human is simply unsuited to this type of operation (See a shortish Stretch Wrap Video) and risk assessment procedures and recommendations cannot produce documentation that would justify reducing this activity from the current high risk category... The trouble however is that it's your back at risk, no-one else's... They just walk by and leave it to you.
Back injury is guaranteed, sooner or later, perhaps coupled with trip injuries caused by a degree of dizziness following the completion of the operation. Odd really that health risk inducing products such as alcohol and drugs are barred from the workplace for doing just this. Increasing awareness of these issues in the last two years is causing more Companies to revert to using plastic strapping to eliminate these risks, reduce costs and make the securing of product onto pallets easier and faster, using simple low cost strapping machines, the best of which can be seen on www.pscl.co.uk but watch this short video Ease back pain and get a quick idea of what we suggest.