In this day and age, the growing use of plastic in the workplace presents a new range of safety problems when considering fire alarms.

Fire Alarms for the Plastic Workplace

The use of plastic multi-level storage bins and plastic racking is on the increase, along with plastic parts and finished goods. Plastic wrapping is becoming more commonplace, and production parts are held in plastic bins.

These developments present a challenge to fire safety because the ever-increasing use of plastic in the workplace presents ever-increasing fire loads and often higher rates of potential fire growth. This is borne out by many recent insurance reports pointing to a rise in major fires and financial losses from fire.

There can be not only be potential loss of life, but also loss of plant, machinery, buildings, stock, data and loss of customers, who go elsewhere to continue their business.

Alongside this are constraints on fire service budgets and resources, which could impact on the service’s ability to respond. For instance, the fire service in England is advised by the Environment Agency to allow premises, once safely evacuated, to burn down, in order to minimize fire water run-off to ground water.

However, the means do exist to minimize the damage and impact of fires involving plastic. For example, multi-sensors within single fire detectors to increase their sensitivity and reliability to respond to a developing fire. Also beam detectors can project across large open areas to pick up the existence of smoke from fire.

But, the effectiveness of sprinklers is limited when fighting fires which involve plastic materials, because burning plastics effectively become flammable liquids.

For these situations, foam must be used to blanket the burning plastic to cool and suppress flammable vapours, and to create a barrier between the fuel and the air it needs to burn.

Many business owners do not have integrated fire alarm systems installed because they wrongly believe they are too expensive.

However, responsible owners and operators of shops, offices, warehousing and factory facilities can ensure the effectiveness of fire protection measures by conducting a fire risk assessment to identify the nature and extent of the fire hazards and those at risk and ensuring that detection and protection systems certified to BS 5839 are installed by specialist companies whose competence is third-party accredited and audited.

A proper accredited installation company will also maintain the operational readiness of the fire systems.

These steps should minimise the risk and therefore potential damage of fire in the increasingly plastic workplace.