Proven Steps to Building a Safer Industrial Facility

Training gaps, load blind spots, plant noise, cramped layouts and deferred maintenance put forklift operators and pedestrians at risk in heavy industrial plants.

• By Alex Johns
• Nov 05, 2026

At a recycling facility in Rhode Island, 35 employees work alongside five forklifts, shredding electronic materials, reducing particle size, and preparing dense metallic samples for smelting and refining. It is exactly the kind of high-traffic, heavy-material footprint where forklifts and pedestrians inevitably share tight spaces.

In 2021, that proximity caught up with the facility: a close-call incident occurred between an employee and a forklift. No one was hurt, but it was a wake-up call for site leadership to re-evaluate how they managed pedestrian and vehicle interaction.

The facility belongs to Glencore. While the plant focuses on processing end-of-life electronics and lithium-ion batteries, its floor plan shares the exact same risk profile as any heavy manufacturing or processing facility: tight corners, loud machinery, heavy loads, and compromised visibility.

Following the 2021 incident, plant manager Juan Carlos Molines went looking for a proximity detection system that could perform in tight, heavily obstructed environments, not just wide-open warehouse aisles. The facility chose an active proximity detection system that uses ultra-wideband (UWB) technology. The system senses exactly when a person or vehicle enters a forklift's configurable danger zone, immediately flags the operator, and automatically throttles the truck's speed until the hazard clears.

Today, every forklift and individual on-site, including visitors, carries a UWB transceiver. The system's alert zones are precisely tuned to the facility's specific blind spots and structural obstructions. Since deployment, Glencore has maintained a clean record with zero significant forklift incidents. Safety is now actively engineered into daily workflows and visitor protocols rather than sitting on a shelf as a reactive, one-time fix.

The High-Stakes Reality of Material Handling

Glencore's turnaround highlights a broader industrial reality. Despite decades of mandatory safety training, forklift accidents resulting in severe injuries or amputations continue to plague industrial facilities.

Heavy industrial facilities, fabrication shops, and processing plants carry an exceptionally high concentration of risk. Forklifts in these environments aren't moving light, standardized consumer goods; they are balancing multi-ton payloads, massive raw materials, long bar stock, and bundled tubing. These loads feature sharp edges, irregular profiles, and notoriously high centers of gravity.

When you mix these unforgiving payloads with constant overhead machinery traffic, dim high-bay lighting, and floors slick with oil, coolant, or manufacturing debris, even a split-second error can turn catastrophic.

The broader data underscores the urgency. Of all forklift-related severe injuries reported to OSHA in 2022 and 2023, manufacturing was the largest contributing sector, accounting for 33% of all cases. Transportation and warehousing followed at 26%, with wholesale trade at 14%.

Modern industrial facilities often sit squarely at the intersection of all three. They warehouse and distribute materials like a wholesaler, but the cutting, shaping, and material processing occurring on the floor mirrors heavy manufacturing. No matter how a facility is classified on paper, the physical exposure is identical.

To systematically drive down this risk, operations and safety leaders must target five critical floor-level vulnerabilities.

Five Critical Floor Vulnerabilities and How to Fix Them

1. Outpaced Operator Training

OSHA attributes more than a third of all forklift mishaps directly to operator error. While basic certification is standard, generic training programs rarely prepare a driver for the day-to-day realities of a fast-paced production floor.

The Reality: Operators are routinely shuffled between counterbalance trucks, heavy-duty side loaders, and specialized material handlers with zero transitional guidance.

The Fix: Implement site-specific, load-specific training. Drivers need hands-on experience handling long-length bundles or unbalanced loads through narrow cantilever racking before taking them into active, high-traffic production zones.

2. Severe Payload Blind Spots

Forklifts are inherently visibility-limited machines, and dense industrial payloads compound the issue significantly.

The Reality: A raised stack of plate or a bundle of materials blocks forward visibility. Large payloads carried on a ram or saddle obscure front and lateral sightlines simultaneously, while sitting high in the cab distorts the operator's depth perception around structural columns and machinery bays.

The Fix: Stop relying solely on driver line-of-sight. Deploy active driver-assist technology, such as AI-powered pedestrian detection cameras or UWB sensor networks, that act as an extra set of eyes to flag hazards obscured by massive loads.

3. High-Decibel Pedestrian Blindness

Industrial processing plants are loud. The constant roar of production machinery, high-speed lines, shears, and overhead cranes easily drowns out standard forklift horns or standard backup alarms.

The Reality: Workers focused on staging material or operating machinery often have no auditory awareness of an approaching truck. Informal hand signals and "common sense" right-of-way rules consistently break down under intense production pressure.

The Fix: Install active, multi-layered alert systems. If a pedestrian approaches a blind intersection or a dynamic work cell, the environment itself should react, using automated zone-based speed reductions for the vehicle and highly visible, projecting light paths for the worker.

4. Organic, Outgrown Layouts

As facilities scale, floor plans frequently evolve organically to accommodate new production machinery, often sacrificing safety spacing in the process.

The Reality: Narrow aisles, tight clearance at the ends of racking, cluttered staging docks, and sparse lighting in high-bay areas create an error-prone environment for operators navigating multi-ton loads.

The Fix: Audit material flow paths regularly. Mark pedestrian walkways clearly with durable, high-visibility boundaries. Ensure scrap drops, banding materials, and partially staged bundles are confined to designated zones out of primary transit paths.

5. Heavy-Duty Strain and Deferred Maintenance

Flipping, lifting, and traveling with dense industrial loads subjects a forklift's steering, hydraulics, and braking systems to extreme mechanical stress.

The Reality: Postponing preventive maintenance to hit a daily production or shipping quota is a systemic issue that directly leads to catastrophic component failure on the floor.

The Fix: Shift from reactive or basic calendar-based maintenance to predictive, data-driven fleet management. Use integrated telematics to monitor real-time mechanical strain, track actual impact G-forces, and automatically lock out equipment the moment a critical safety or mechanical threshold is breached.

The Bottom Line

Improving forklift safety across an industrial footprint is not a bureaucratic compliance checkbox. When you factor in the devastating human cost of an accident, alongside equipment downtime, damaged inventory, and punitive regulatory fines, it becomes clear that safety is a hard operational metric.

By taking a systematic approach as Glencore did at its processing facility and leveraging modern, active driver-assistance technologies, facility managers can reduce close calls and build a stronger foundation for long-term safety.