When people at a trade show find out youβre a journalist, they tend to ask, βWhatβs the theme of the show?β While thatβs a fair question, often times there isnβt an easy answer. There are so many industrial trade shows these daysβwith both regional and national locations, it seems as though there is one every month or two. Often times, all my booth visits seem to consist of sales staff telling me that theyβre just showing off the same old products. Maybe, if Iβm lucky, they launched a new product 6 or 8 months ago, and they have it displayed there with the same booth they drag out to every show.
So, itβs refreshing to attend a show where a single topic comes up over and over. And the thing that kept jumping out at me at last weekβs massive PackExpo Las Vegas was safety.
Over the past decade or so, safety has big a bigger issue in Europe than in the United States. I had a great, long talk with Ronald Hudson, an applications engineer at Festo Corp. in Livermore, Calif. Ron explained that safety in Europe is the responsibility of the machine builder, while here itβs the responsibility of the user.
βSafety is driven by legislation in Europe, and by litigation in the U.S.,β Hudson said.
That was a fascinating way to put it, and it makes sense. In the EU, dozens of countries need to have equal standards, while the American attitude sometimes, is, sadly, βWhat can we get away with?β In Europe, he said, safety issues are addressed based on:
1. The potential to eliminate the danger,
2. The severity of a possible accident, and
3. The chance of an accident.
Hudson thinks safety will evolve rapidly here in the U.S., but pushed along by multinational companies like Nestle, who will demand the same safety standards for equipment in their plants worldwide. It doesnβt matter to them whether the plant is in Topeka or Tallinn. They want their people to be safe and their plants to have a minimum of downtime. Properly designing safety into the industrial environment can accomplish both.
