In an age where the Industry is continuously encouraged to minimize the negative impacts on the environment, I am still asked, to my utter surprise “what is the point of having spill kits?”
In short, in the event of a spillage occurring, if you do not have access to decent spill kits, or absorbents, the cost and risk to personnel safety and the environmental damage increases drastically!
It is important to ensure that you have the correct type of spill kits. It is crucial to always assess the highest risk or highest potential of spillage, and also very importantly it must have the correct absorption capacity.
Legislation, such as the Waste Management Act and Hazardous Substances act enforces the responsible end to end management of spillages. This entails as per example, that in the event of contamination of rivers taking place, the relevant organization is responsible for the full impact and environmental cost both to land and man. This, as you can imagine can entail hefty costs, fines and even imprisonment if found sloppy.
Common practice, whereby saw dust, loose fiber, or river sand is used as a cheaper alternative, has been proven to be both inefficient and ineffective as an absorbent. Furthermore, river sand or saw dust does not absorb any hazardous vapors and can pose a serious health risk to your teams and most importantly, a fire hazard.
AfriSupply specializes in a wide variety of absorbents for petroleum based liquids, aggressive chemicals and even biological spillages (e.g. blood, urine, plasma) and will gladly assist with advising on the best applicable absorbent and spill containment products to make use of.
We have also made provision for the first and only basic spill kit training DVD available in South Africa. Our Training DVD visually outlines the key practical steps to follow in the event of day to day spillages or major spillages. This is highly recommended to include in your organisations SHEQ training programmes and Safety Inductions.
