There are many factors in the work places that cause sick leaves. MSD (Musculoskeletal Disorder) is one of them; these are all the pains related to the muscles, the joints, the sinews. The MSDs problems are present in office work and in industries. The repetition of a movement, the poor posture, the mechanical and manual handling provokes MSDs.<\/p>\n
The MSD in France represents:<\/p>\n
MSDs related to sick leaves never appears suddenly, some symptoms are noticeable before:<\/p>\n
Most of the time when the symptoms appear there aren\u2019t dealt with because for long time there were considered by being part of the job so there has taken no measures to train the employees for good methods or to improve production practices.<\/p>\n
But we now know the zones that are the most impacted by MSDs. Mainly this is the upper body, more precisely the wrists, the elbows, the shoulders and the back<\/strong> that are affected.<\/p>\n The causes related to the MSDs are:<\/p>\n Some factors can increase and accelerate the creation of a MSD as the cool or the use of a vibrating tool.<\/p>\n The tire industry is impacted by the MSDs disease. In this type of field the ergonomics are not really optimized. In fact, the operators need to push a cart full of rubber, or to move materials from the carts to the machine to prepare the layers. For some positions the tasks are repetitive then it improves the risks of MSDs. Some other tasks require a lot of efforts for example to remove the blocked rubber between the rollers<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The main challenge is to adapt the facilities for the operator because every person don\u2019t have the same morphology and don\u2019t have the same needs.<\/p>\n The risks are the same in rubber industry but the 3 common movements that leads to MSDs are:<\/p>\n One of the perfect illustration of causes for MSD can be found in the tire industry. Often during the tire manufacturing, rubber wastes are generated and needs to be recycled. These wastes are stack, on top of each other<\/strong>, before to be processed. Even though automatization is now common in tire plants, the rubber scraps still needs to be processed by hand<\/strong>. The operator has to lift the scraps by stacks to process it However because tire manufacturing uses green rubbers (extremely sticky), the weight of the compound will cause the stacks to stick together. To remove them it requires tremendous effort which can lead to MSDs.<\/p>\n An internal study reveals that the force requires to detach those stacks can go up to 45 daN (or 45KG)<\/strong> for each lift. If we multiply this by 10 or 20 times per day, it is easy to understand why it is a cause of risk for the operator.<\/p>\n As part of the solution, tire makers can use a fabric separator to limit the agglomeration of the stacks and to facilitate the release. This helps to improve ergonomics and most importantly it can reduce MSDs pains.<\/p>\n OTEGO has developed a material that can drastically reduce the adhesion of the rubber compound to help prevent MSD. The fabric features a non-contaminating coated polymer to be used as a separator in between stacks<\/strong>. An internal study conducted by tire manufacturers has established that using this method brings the force required by the task to under 10 daN (4 times less than with a non-suitable material).\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
2 – THE ISSUE FOR THE INDUSTRIES<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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3 – A REAL AND SPECIFIC CASE OF MSD IN THE TIRE INDUSTRY<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
Recycling of Rubber scraps<\/u><\/span><\/h3>\n