When it comes to industrial paint, it is always essential to handle and store chemical substances with the necessary precaution in order to safeguard the safety and health of your workers. Proper storage and handling of such materials will also protect your production facility including its paint booth, and optimize your business’ product finishing process. Should you fail to adopt safe material storage, you will have to face the risks of quality problems and even wasted costs in materials you make use of. Worse still, doing so might potentially give rise to a number of serious safety and health hazards. On the other hand, when you take full consideration of quality and safety best practices, you will be able to fast track the whole finishing process to guarantee consistent quality in your paint jobs, while also creating a much safer workspace for you and your team. Here are a few tips on how to properly store industrial paint products.
Take all the time you need to completely understand the material you use in your finishing process
Generally speaking, paint and powders together with other related chemicals are known to carry an inherent safety risk when they are not handled or stored as required, and failing to keep this in mind may prove to be a serious mistake. To this end, most of these products necessitate unique environmental conditions in order to be used safely in a spray booth or mix room and even stored safely when not in use. Also, some of these materials need to be stored in specific conditions in order to retain their quality and effectiveness over the passage of time. For instance, industrial liquid paints tend to be very sensitive to extreme temperatures, which if left unchecked, can have a profound influence on their overall quality and shelf life. Alternatively, water-based paints are known to gel whenever they are stored in temperatures beneath the freezing point. Conversely, when stored in hotter temperatures, these sorts of paint will have an undesirable consistency. To this end, storing such paints in such environmental conditions always impedes their overall performance.
Some paints happen to be more susceptible to exposure to the forces of the elements too, and can give rise to safety risks when stored in close proximity to other industrial material. On the flipside, othery types of paints may be conveniently stored on a long-term basis in separate storage rooms or paint booths and won’t require you to take any precautions to guarantee their safety. All in all, it is always wise to first accurately figure out the exact conditions the paints you use have to be stored in before allocating a specific storage area for them.
Take all the time you need to completely understand the safety implications of storing industrial paint
There are certain risks that are related to flammable, explosive, or even combustible materials including atomized liquids, powders, and solvents. For example, some materials found in specific powders are known to be combustible when they are in their atomized condition (during spray application in a spray paint), and there is always a heightened risk of deflagration. On the other hand, certain solvent-based paints may give rise to both health and safety risks due to their toxic vapors and the toxins they release in the air. Additionally, chemicals including thinners, adhesives, polishes, cleaners, or gloss, are known to be either flammable or combustible. At the same time, some organic and metallic dust might ignite and cause a deflagration upon being released into the air. Essentially, these products are not regarded as being combustible under ordinary conditions. However, under certain circumstances and in close proximity to an ignition source, these materials will trigger a deflagration.
What all this really boils down to is you will have to exercise a lot of caution when storing such materials. To always be on the safe side, it will be prudent of you to review the Safety Data Sheet included in the packaging of such products. Alternatively, you may contact your supplier to obtain answers regarding the chemical properties and the related safety and health hazards you and your workers can be exposed to if you don’t handle or store industrial paints properly. The Safety Data Sheet will allow you to determine if a chemical is flammable, combustible, light-sensitive, or even corrosive. It will also alert you if such chemicals necessitate identification, special handling within a paint booth or mix room, ventilation, or temperature control.
Lastly, chemical compositions of specific paints can trigger specific safety hazards whenever stored together with other incompatible materials. This signifies it is always critical to determine how some paints can react when stored close to other material, which you use in your facility. In such situations, you will have to consider storing such paints in special areas like a hazardous material storage building. Hazardous material storage buildings are specially designed to safely store big amounts of paints, powders along with other dangerous materials and must be safety codes compliant. Hazardous materials storage buildings can also be used to safely mix and pump industrial paints if doing so in a spray booth is risky. These products are built to conform with the International Fire Code and NFPA 30 Flammable & Combustible Liquid Code for storage of chemical materials.
What amount of paint can you store in your facility?
The amount of paint you are permitted to store in your production shop is determined by the class the paint falls under and the maximum allowable quantity (MAQ). The latter of which is the amount of flammable or combustible material present in the paint prior to extra measures being taken to mitigate the hazard. MAQ values tend to vary from the class of the paint and if the container is open or shut and are tabulated in NFPA 30, NFPA 33, and the International Fire Code (IFC). Should your production facility’s paint booth have an automatic sprinkler system, the MAQ value for storing paint may be increased by 100%. Alternatively, this value may be increased by another 100% if you store your paint in an exhausted enclosure like a mix room or a hazardous material storage building.
We at Zpar International are here for all of your finishing system and paint booth needs. Give us a call today at 503-7788-0212 and let’s find the product that’s best for you!