Use of Personal Protective Equipment in Micro-Scale Wood Working Enterprises

Abstract

About two million employees lose their lives from work-related diseases or accidents every year. Further, 317 million employees suffer from work-related diseases and 337 million work-related accidents per year are estimated. The incidence rate of these work-related diseases or accidents varies according to sectors. The wood manufacturing sector is one of the risky sub-sectors within the manufacturing sector in terms of work-related hazards. Furthermore, the vast majority of enterprises, operating in the manufacturing sector, are of micro-scale. Such enterprises have to cope with many business constrains and their ability to control risks is lower. Therefore, the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) remains the ultimate tool for micro-scale enterprises to protect their employees from occupational diseases and accidents. In this study, the types of PPE used, their usage rates, the motivations for not using them and other issues related to PPE in the micro-scale furniture and sawmill sub-sectors were investigated. The study was conducted in 120 micro-scale enterprises in Trabzon, Turkey. A structured face-to-face questionnaire survey was used to gather information from the owner/employees of the enterprises. It has been revealed that the use of PPE in the enterprises producing furniture was higher than in the sawmill and the most prevalent reason for PPE usage was to protect the employees from wood dust. About half of the owner/employees did not indicate any reason for not using the PPE. However, the remaining stated that they did not use personal protective equipments (PPEs) because these often made it difficult to work.