With the extreme heat, the health & safety committee suggested purchasing "cooling scarves" to be worn by production employees. The work in and area with no air conditioning and production is done near and over open containers.
My concerns are: buying enough scarves so they can be washed after each use, who would wash them (we have a washing machine onsite for emergencies but use an external uniform provider for laundry), potential foreign objects falling into our products (the scarves themselves or the "beads/crystals" inside the casing).
Does anyone have experience with either having cooling scarves in production or other cooling methods (besides fans, which we have)? Thank you in advance!
Here is a description of a random cooling scarf found online: "[...] wear cool scarves like ties around their necks, which gives them a feeling of a cool wet cloth on the back of their necks. A cool scarf is a strip of cotton woven fabric that has been filled nontoxic polyacrylamide granules (crystals) concealed in the casing of the scarf. When the scarf is soaked in water for 15-30 minutes, the granules absorb the water, expand 400 times, and turn into a crystalline gel. The cotton fabric absorbs water from the gel, and then the water evaporates for a cooling effect. Scarves stay cool and moist for hours due to the polyacrylamide's water-retaining properties. When the scarves are allowed to dry, the gel returns to crystal form. Cool scarves can cool for up to 15 hours."