Selecting a Chemical-Resistant Glove

There are literally thousands of styles of gloves that we can offer you here at Conney Safety. I want to give you a very simple approach to help you ask the right questions when selecting a chemical-resistant glove for your workers. If you can answer these simple questions, you should be able to get your choices narrowed down quickly:

1. What are the exact chemicals you are working with? This sounds obvious, but mixtures can be difficult to predict how they will react with a given glove material.
2. What is the work application? Are the gloves for incidental splashes or complete immersion?  How long will the chemicals be exposed to the chemical over the course of a day/week?
3. What kind of glove had you been using? This is important for us to know, as it gives some idea what may or may not have worked well in the past for a similar type of work situation.
4. Do you need a “Supported” or Unsupported” style of glove? If your employee needs good dexterity, they are going to prefer an unsupported glove. If they have heat or cold handling applications, a supported glove might make more sense. A supported glove has a fabric liner that will absorb some sweat, plus it makes the glove a little tougher.
5. What length of glove do you need? There is normally a dramatic difference in cost once our customers begin looking at longer length gloves. Sometimes it is more cost effective to use chemical sleeves with a shorter length glove cuff.
6. Let us review the chemical resistant glove guides. It is important that we take the time to look at our manufacturers’ test data on how a category of glove material reacts with various chemicals. As a safety specialist, I closely look at both the “permeation” and “degradation” data provided by the vendor.

While there is no chemical test data on every glove produced, we can make educated decisions on which glove material will work best, partially based on some of the responses to the questions above. Just remember, common sense has to prevail anytime a new chemical glove is being introduced to a given work situation.

Feel free to call us at the Conney Safety Support Team at 800-462-1947, if you have any questions about your situation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under Safety Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.