AMI has developed a Safe Equipment Design Checklist

The American Meat Inst. (AMI) has developed a Safe Equipment Design Checklist aimed at ensuring that equipment used in meat and

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Developed by a special subcommittee of AMI's Worker Safety Committee, the Checklist was unveiled at the 2011 Worker Safety, Human Resources and the Environment Conference, held in Kansas City.

Using the checklist will help ensure compliance with Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) rules and with relevant consensus standards like those published by the National Fire Protection Association, American National Standards Institute, American Society of Mechanical Engineers and others. 

The checklist aims to foster design with a focus on preventing injuries and creating equipment that is worker friendly. It covers 10 key principles of safe equipment design: equipment guarding; design and engineering; energy control; ergonomics; training; ingress/egress; hazard communication; confined spaces and hazardous locations; fall protection; and process safety management. 

The document may be downloaded as an Excel file from http://www.meatami.com/ or http://www.workersafety.org/, AMI's dedicated worker safety website. 

"Our long-term goal is to eliminate hazards before they are created," said AMI Worker Safety Committee Chairman Travis Ellis, corporate director of environmental, health & safety at Land-O-Frost, Inc. "This checklist is an important compilation of strategies from some of the best minds in worker safety and I am confident that they will be meaningful and applicable for meat and poultry companies."