In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, James Porter, Hand Safety Specialist, Superior Glove, explains the types of cut-resistant materials used in the company’s gloves.
This clip is taken from a webinar titled How to Understand & Apply ANSI Hand Safety Standards, which is available for free on-demand here. This webinar is sponsored by Superior Glove.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Porter: Cut resistant materials, you’ll see it on the slide there, HPPE versus para-aramid. For those that are not aware, para-aramid is the same thing as DuPont’s Kevlar, so that is an off-brand of Kevlar. Para-aramid is used throughout gloves quite a bit for because of its cut resistance. It also has high resistance to heat and melting as well, but you’ll see that that first picture there talks about HPPE versus para-aramid.
HPPE stands for high performance polyethylene, para-aramid. If you guys have ever worn Kevlar, it can be a little scratchy and itchy to the as far as feeling on the skin. High performance polyethylene has increased the comfort level tremendously throughout cut-resistant materials. HPPE does have its limits as far as cut protection, so a lot of your HPPE, straight HPPE and solely para-aramid designed gloves will typically only get you to about a three-cut level. They are great cut-resistant materials, but they do have their limits.
I mentioned the metal chainmail gloves as well. These aren’t as prominent as they used to be. These used to be out in the market quite a bit more than they are currently, but you will see them quite extensively throughout harvesting. So any company that harvests meat from an animal, you will typically see metal chainmail in their production. They usually use it on the off hand and then they will use some type of glove that has better grip on the knife hand and that way they have full protection on the hand that they’re not using with a knife. And then they’ll use a high cut-resistance, great grip glove for handling that the knife handle.
So as far as advancements and innovation, Superior’s known for that. Two of their main company values are family, so they treat us like family. Innovation is their other company value. They value innovation so much that on Tesla and Einstein’s birthday, they will send me a card with $20 in it to celebrate their birthdays because it is one of the company’s main values.
With that innovation comes composite and engineered yarns. So composite yarns are going to be where you take multiple different yarns and put them together so you can blend them or you can twist them. And then engineered yarns would be ones that they make from scratch.
One of the great things about Superior Glove is a lot of the facility that I had mentioned in the previous slide in regards to Honduras, as soon as we built that plant, we added on to that facility and that addition to that facility was mainly for the production of raw materials. So we make a lot of our own composite and engineer yarns in house.
We all learned through COVID that relying on the supply chain in order to make your product was very challenging during that time frame. And there’s still some aftermath, especially with the strikes recently on the ports. So we are moving a lot of our manufacturing to North America and with that we also have increased our production on raw material production so that we can supply our own materials needed to make the safety products for our customers.