James Ross and Sons Newcastle Ltd, a pickle manufacturer, had raw materials delivered in plastic barrels, of varying sizes weighing up to 250kg, on wooden pallets. This created a manual handling hazard as they needed to be moved onto plastic pallets for food hygiene reasons. The ideal solution would have been to persuade the suppliers to deliver on plastic pallets, but this was not possible. One back injury had been reported, which might have been caused by moving the barrels from wooden to plastic pallets.

Observation of the task of moving the barrels showed two different techniques. They both involved bent or twisted bodies, considerably flexed elbows, poor handholds (because of the barrels’ design) and an unstable footing with one foot on the edge of the plastic pallet and one on the floor. The forces used to tilt and then rotate the barrel from one pallet to another were assessed as being in excess of that at which a detailed assessment is recommended. The barrels had 4 different sorts of handhold, but none of them provided the grip necessary to fully support the horizontal push/pull forces being used. This meant a risk of injury to the fingers and arm/hand, because of the poor hand grasp postures that had to be used.

Ordinary FLT barrel handlers could not be used to move the barrels as the barrels were plastic and the attachments kept damaging the barrels and spoiling the food. Furthermore they did not fit the full range of barrels tthe company received.

The solution was, through a specialist handling company, to design an FLT accessory that can handle the barrels without damaging them and which was adjustable to different barrel sizes. 

The first picture below shows what staff used to do to manual handle barrels onto a stand so that an FLT could move them.  The second picture shows the specially designed FLT attachment that eliminates this handling task.