Content area
Full Text
The biggest change is two levels of lens performance: Basic Impact and High Impact.
The next time one of your employees reaches for his safety eyewear, he might need to do a double take in order to ensure he's getting the right level of protection for the job. That's because the American National Standards Institute is all but set to publish a revision to its current standard, ANSI Z87.1-1989, in order to make it easier to select the specific eye protection needed for a given task.
The change means manufacturers will need to retest or develop new protectors; safety professionals will have to reassess job tasks and their employees' needs; and workers will have to pay closer attention to what type of eye protection they are wearing or might need to wear in order to be safe.
The new standard, ANSI Z87.1-2003, is set to go into effect sometime in the middle of this month, if everything goes as scheduled, according to Dan Torgersen, who is vice chair of the standard's ANSI committee and technical director of the Optical Laboratories Association (OLA). While there are several changes and minor alterations to the old standard, which went into effect in 1989 and then was reaffirmed in 1998, the most noticeable difference deals with eye protector impact levels.
"The principal change will be the two classifications for impact," explained Tor-gersen. "The impact is a principal characteristic of industrial eyewear. In the '89 standard, there is only one classification; in the new standard there are two. In the new high-impact test, the lens cannot dislodge from the frame. If, in the hazardous assessment an employer must conduct, the test indicates...