What is the Proper Content for an ANSI Z535.2 Environmental or Facility Safety Sign?

The content of your safety signs is incredibly important. The mistake of having incomplete content can lead to accidents that result in personal injuries, deaths, property damage, and litigation. That's why determining the proper content for your safety signs is a serious matter and one that deserves your utmost attention. Fortunately, you know your facility and we know the standards necessary to help you get your warnings where they need to be. Clarion has been in leadership positions on the ANSI and ISO safety sign standards-writing committees for the past two decades and we have unparalleled amount of experience in applying these standards for manufacturers in a large variety of industries. As you will see, successfully defining the content your safety signs is a collaborative effort that involves critical choices, and well-informed decisions need to be made to get things right.

Often manufacturers come to Clarion to revise safety signs that were designed using the old, outdated 1941-era OSHA-style safety sign formats. These signs typically have large type, short generic messages, and lack symbols (Figure 1). You should know that in 2002 these old safety sign formats were completely removed from the ANSI standards for environmental and facility safety signs. This was done for several good reasons, one of which is that they do not accommodate the level of content now expected for a facility safety sign.

Fig. 1 Old OSHA-style safety signs made obsolete by ANSI Z535.2 in 2002

When it comes to facility safety sign content, at the root of the matter is this: your signs should typically convey the following four content elements:

• The nature of the hazard (i.e. the type of hazard; for example, shock, cut, burn, etc.).
• The consequence of interaction with the hazard.
• How to avoid the hazard.
• The seriousness level of the hazard.

Figure 2 shows how a typical Clarion safety sign does the job of conveying these four content elements.

Fig. 2 How Clarion signs communicate the ANSI content requirements

Our advice to include all four content elements is bolstered by the last fifty years of U.S. facility liability case law. Over the years this content has essentially become the prevailing U.S. legal definition for what constitutes an "adequate" warning. The ANSI Z535 committee recognized this in the 1980s and 1990s and followed the courts' lead by incorporating these content items into both the ANSI Z535.4 Product Safety Sign and Label standard and the ANSI Z535.2 Environmental and Facility Safety Sign standard. As shown in the illustrations above, and according to these ANSI standards, the first three bullet pointed items of content are conveyed by the word message and/or the symbol. The signal word panel communicates the last item of content; hazard seriousness.

Although the ANSI standards allow you to omit one or more of the three content elements conveyed by the word message or symbol (hazard nature, consequence, and avoidance), you should have a pretty good reason before doing so. Yes, you could argue that the injured person could have "inferred" the missing content from your safety sign's context of use or from some other source. But you could also lose this argument. The question is, is it worth the risk? When working with our customers, our advice is to consider including all items of content in their safety signs, if it's possible to do so. Whether you do or don't do this, keep your risk assessment documents that show what you considered in terms of the content of your facility's safety signs – these documents will become important if a liability lawsuit arises involving your facility.

The key to developing the content for your safety signs involves three things:

1. Knowing your facility's potential hazards and the information needed to avoid the hazards (ascertained from your facility's risk assessment).
2. Knowing how to use a standards-based approach to formatting the message with words, symbols, colors and formats that will suit your particular market audience.
3. Knowing how other companies and industries have approached communicating similar hazard information.

As our customer, we recognize that the first of the above items is in your court - you know your facility and its potential hazards better than anyone. As for the second item, we have the ability to discuss the information you provide us and work with you to give you an understanding of your standards-based options for formatting this information into a safety sign or sign. And finally, as regards the third point, we've worked with over 10,000+ manufacturers in 180+ industries and we can assist you to also understand how other companies have addressed communicating similar hazard information. It's in this way that working with Clarion in the development of your facility's safety signs is a collaborative exercise that is both efficient and effective, saving you both time and money in development costs, and, most importantly, getting this critical task done right.

The job of defining the proper content of your facility's safety signs is one that is never finished. You must periodically re-evaluate your signs in light of changes to the standards, as new symbols become codified, and as new facility safety and accident information comes to light. Choosing Clarion as your safety sign manufacturer benefits your company as we are fully informed as to where the safety signage standards are changing and which safety symbols are currently in the ISO registration process. We look forward to being of assistance to your company.