5 replies to this topic

[Dian Yodana]

Hi everyone,

 

Does anyone here have experience with flour in woven sacks? How do you package flour to prevent dust?

 

If the woven sacks are sewn with inner plastic bags, sometimes during storage (stacking on pallets) the inner plastic bags are damaged/broken, and the flour becomes dusty. How do you prevent this dust?

 

Could you share your experience?

 

Thank you.

 

[MDaleDDF]

I work with flour based products.   Simple answer:   Lots of cleaning.

[jcieslowski]

Not flour, but I worked with raw and processed sugars.  They were also quite messy.  Answer was, as previously suggested, lots of cleaning.

 

I'd just like to remind that small powder is a HUGE fire risk (even explosion risk depending on confinement) so please put extra efforts into ensuring your cleaning procedures are cleaning even hard to reach spaces and that accumulations of flour on horizontal surfaces is removed frequently and kept to a minimum.

[MDaleDDF]

I'd just like to remind that small powder is a HUGE fire risk (even explosion risk depending on confinement) so please put extra efforts into ensuring your cleaning procedures are cleaning even hard to reach spaces and that accumulations of flour on horizontal surfaces is removed frequently and kept to a minimum.

Meh...... it is in certain conditions, but little bits like this on warehouse shelves, etc, it's not.   It has to be airborne just right, so in silos, dust collection systems, etc, yeah it is, and can cause quite an explosion.   But not in an example like this.   It has to be airborne in particles.   If you dump a bag of flour on the flour and hit the pile with a blowtorch, nothing will happen.   Also, it's not flour, it's dust so it can happen with corn, grains, etc.   The best example video on youtube is actually a corn silo explosion.  But there are plenty of videos on there showing what flour will do when under the right circumstances!

 

There was a flour complex in Hillsdale MI that blew up when I was a kid from that tho!   Silo explosion.

Edited by MDaleDDF, Today, 02:29 PM.

[jcieslowski]

I've got to be honest MDaleDDF, I'm not sure why you're downplaying the fire risk.   There are, on average, 28 dust explosions or fires annually.  If someone is new to safety, I think that it's something worth mentioning.   You downplay "an example like this" but Dian doesn't mention anything about current cleaning methods so we can't really know what level of dust is in their plant.   Better safe than sorry.

[MDaleDDF]

I appreciate your honesty.   Yes, dust explosions happen.  I didn't mean to downplay it.   I just meant by the measuring stick given by the op, flour explosion was not a concern.   Perhaps in other parts of their plant it is, but flour leaking out a tiny bit like that isn't a dust explosion/fire risk.   Nowhere does the op state they're "new to safety", and they're working around flour based product, so I must assume they are informed about dust explosions.   Dust explosion issue quite simply, was not the Op's question, so I guess that's why I kind of sluffed it off....