Workplace Eye Safety: What You Can Do 
Unless you are a construction worker or a chemist, you might not think about eye safety in your workplace. Yet according to the government’s Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA), about 1000 eye injuries take place in the workplace every day. Around 10% of these eye injuries are serious enough to cause people to miss days of work.
With injuries happening every day, it is important to ensure you are taking the proper steps to account for the safety of your eyes while at work. You don’t have to be working in crawlspaces or with dangerous chemicals to have your eyes at risk.
Common Causes of Workplace Eye Injuries
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), an estimated 70% of eye injuries result from falling or flying objects. That number may not be surprising, but it may surprise you that over 60% of those injuries are caused by objects smaller than a pinhead and traveling faster than people have time to react.
Most eye injuries could not be prevented just by paying more attention or dodging out of the way quickly. Chemical contact only causes about 20% of all injuries, but that is still significant enough to take under consideration if you work around any chemicals.
Protective Eyeware for Work
Since roughly 90%of all eye injuries are caused by tiny objects or chemicals, there are several simple ways to ensure the safety of your eyes while at work. Adequate protective eyeware can prevent most common cause of eye injuries. However, the most common form of workplace protective eyeware is safety glasses.
While safety glasses effectively prevent many types of danger to your eye, the fact they only shield your eyes directly from the front can leave them vulnerable from the sides. Small particles can speed into your eye from an angle, and an unexpected chemical spill can still get to your eyes. Because of this, safety goggles are the best form of workplace eye safety. They wrap around all sides of your eyes, and they provide a protective barrier that’s simply more effective than safety glasses.
Even if your work only uses safety glasses, consider purchasing yourself a pair of safety goggles for maximum protection.
Preventing Eye Injuries at Work
Most businesses that have any sort of occupational safety risk have an employee who monitors workplace safety. Whether this is just another hat the owner of a small business wears or a full time career for someone at a large manufacturing company, there should always be someone monitoring potential dangers at work.
There are several basic steps any safety manager should go through to ensure the workplace is as safe as possible. First, it’s important to identify all potential eye hazards. This includes chemicals or any machine that might send tiny particles flying through the air.
Then, any hazard that can be fixed through enclosure or isolation should be eliminated that way. Finally, protective safety goggles should be supplied in abundance so no worker is every without protective eyeware. Eye injuries at work may happen every day, but if you are careful, you can avoid them happening to you.
[Photo Via: Working Person]