In modern times, the looming threat of environmental disaster is casting a shadow over us all. As natural disasters get more severe every year thanks to climate change, our televisions are haunted by images of burning forests in California and sweeping floods through the United Kingdom. It’s every person’s responsibility to do what they can to help take care of our planet, which is why even the safety barriers you erect in your workplace should be as environmentally friendly as possible. Every facet of every business can stand to have its impact on the environment reduced, which is why top-tier companies like A-Safe ensure that their products offer superlative quality in both environmental impact reduction and the delivery of a superior safety product. Green barriers aren’t necessarily those safety obstacles that come in an attractive shade of emerald. They’re designed to minimise their impact on our planet’s environment and to keep the earth as healthy as possible on an industrial scale.
A Variety of Barriers
Safety should always be your first consideration in any industrial or working environment. For example, your warehouse floor might have both foot traffic and people riding forklifts and other vehicles. You need to install barriers suited to that environment to protect your workers and their workplace against accidents. Pedestrian barriers designed to keep walkers safe are a must, as are low-rise vehicle barriers to prevent errant vehicles from crashing into your columns, walls or stockpiles.
The Environmental Benefits
Traditionally, traffic and pedestrian barriers need to be made from heavy-duty protective materials. In years past, you might have seen the gargantuan steel barriers erected around the UK, particularly at airports and construction sites, to keep people safe from falling objects and heavy traffic. Steel frames were also used for a long time – and in some places still are – in the manufacture of reinforced concrete to produce extremely heavy, immovable barriers, some of which are still in place today.
Unfortunately, the production of steel has a massive carbon footprint. Steel and other metal works are responsible for pumping tonnes of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every year, and the modern trend in barrier safety has shifted away from this focus on metal alloys in search of something more environmentally friendly. A-Safe, which designed their polymer barriers in conjunction with London’s Heathrow airport, took great pains to ensure the minimal carbon footprint of their products, and as a result the numbers speak for themselves. Their traffic and pedestrian barriers produce less than two thousand kilogrammes of carbon dioxide per hundred metres, while the same length of steel actually produces more than twice that volume. Over the course of five years, for example, the comparison becomes even more obvious: the carbon footprint left by polymer safety barriers is a paltry 2,350 kilogrammes, while that left by the steel is 11,933.
When you’re taking the needs of our planet into consideration with your next barrier purchase, these high-grade polymer barriers are an obvious choice. Designed for use in Europe’s busiest airport, they’re not only going to prolong the safety of your workers and your working environment, but that of our planet as well.
