The Right Solution for The Body Shop

In January 2016, international beauty brand The Body Shop carried out stringent health and safety assessments of one of its main warehouses, based in Littlehampton, West Sussex.

“Health and safety regulations are a lot stricter in 2016 and during our regular record keeping, several areas involving racking assessments were highlighted as a priority for concern” said Rob Goodwin, physical process and quality manager for operations at The Body Shop.

The Problem

“The main problem that needed addressing was the health and safety of the pedestrians working in the racking aisles below” explained Caleb Howard, senior sales engineer at Acorn Storage. “The wide aisles of The Body Shop’s warehouse have a lot of operatives – around 60-80 people - order picking on the ground level below, which meant the potential risk for pallet fall-through and for serious injury.”

With mesh on the racking shelves, the pallets were potentially able to fall-out from a height of up to 10m onto both forklift operatives and staff order picking on the ground below.

The Solution

Acorn initially considered installing steel anti-collapse meshing as a viable solution to the racking problem. However, the lack of flexibility meant mesh panels could be easily damaged when putting pallets away, therefore netting was suggested as a more forgiving solution for this particular application. The flexibility of the netting would also make it easier to fit around the existing sprinkler system.