Meta Description: This article provides a comprehensive guide to reflective tape for your business to utilize appropriately in commercial and industrial capacities.
A guide to reflective tape for your business is vital from both marketing and safety points of view. If you’re planning to transform your business premises into safer and reflective ones, this helpful article is for you.
Reflective tape might look like a simple accessory; however, you’ll do better if you know the different types, color indications, regulatory laws, various usages, etc., to use it more effectively.
Stay put as we’ll take you through this informative article and put you in a better position about reflective tape’s usage in businesses.
What Is Reflective Tape and How Does It Work?
Reflective tape is a film that contains artificial prisms and glass beads. Typically, reflective tapes feature various translucent colors to illuminate back in the light source.
Reflective tape ensures safety. The proper use of reflective tape can minimize accidents, casualties, and property loss.
But how does reflective tape work?
Simply put, reflective tape reflects the light to where it came from, meaning sending it back to the light source. It illuminates itself and becomes visible to the viewer as it does so.
For instance, if you’re flashing a light on a reflective tape while walking down the road, the tape will illuminate back in your direction. On the flip side, a person who’s not casting any flashlight on the reflective tape wouldn’t see the tape unless he comes extremely close to it.
Remember throwing a tennis ball at a wall that instantly bounces back to you? Reflective tape works just like that. You can also relate it to a cat’s eyes that reflect brightly in the dark when in contact with light.
Practical Uses of Reflective Tape in Businesses
Reflective tape covers diverse areas, from small businesses to industrial capacities. International standards and regulations require every business to ensure workplace safety.
If you consider utilizing reflective tape to ensure safety in your business, check some of its substantial uses below:
-
Industrial Uses
You’ll find reflective tape in the industrial arena extremely handy. Its uses include:
-
Warehouse Uniforms
Reflective tape is vital on uniforms of workers operating heavy machinery and gear. Your hard-working laborers must be detectable in the bustling areas of the plant or factory to avoid unintended collisions or accidents.
-
Warehouse Floors
You can’t deny the significance of reflective tape marking the hazardous parts of a warehouse. It helps distinguish the food or material packaging area, expired products section, electric hazard zones, etc.
-
Risky Objects
You can minimize severe head injuries from bumping into low-height doors, overhead pipeworks, etc., by applying reflective tape to these risky objects. Furthermore, you can highlight the piled-up goods or accessories at your workplace or warehouse with reflective tape.
-
Emergency Escapes
Your employees and workers may collide when escaping an emergency, such as an earthquake or fire alarm. It mostly happens due to the inability to recognize the escape route out of panic in low visibility. Highlighting the emergency routes, doors, and stairs can significantly reduce such risks.
-
Construction Sites
If you’re in the construction business, your workers have to be careful of specific locations on a project site. Besides, trucks should carry heavy materials cautiously across the area. Marking the risky zones, walking paths, and vehicle routes with reflective tape will save you from casualties and financial losses.
-
Small to Medium Businesses
Reflective tape can help you achieve productivity, safety, and smooth operation, even in small to medium businesses. Let’s check how:
-
Vehicle Safety
You would never want your business or industrial vehicles to have longer downtimes during business hours. Downtimes take place due to unintended dents, collisions, or roadside accidents. So make your cars and trucks detectable from a distance by attaching reflective tape to them.
-
Mark Risky Areas and Objects
You can mark certain areas within your office territory, including store-room, generator, out-of-order coffee machine, conference room, or any restricted room with reflective tape. It’ll minimize a lot of undesired mess in the office facility.
-
Legal Issues
Accidents are unpredictable, and you must be prepared to handle legal matters related to them. If your cars and trucks are detectable through reflective tape, you won’t be as likely to be held accountable for the accident and get unnecessarily involved in legal issues.
-
Identifying Changes
Highlight specific changes in your office with reflective tape to avoid a mess. Use reflective tape to indicate if the employees have to temporarily use a different lunchroom or washroom. Be creative by sticking a bright reflective tape to the notice board or the desired spot while writing instructions on the tape with a permanent marker.
-
Sports & Recreation
If you’re in the sports and recreation business, you should know how important it is to mark specific spots with reflective tape. Below are a few examples:
-
Water Sports
You can utilize reflective tape by attaching it to a dangerous side of the swimming pool to avoid accidents.
-
Bike Riding
Both bicycles and motorcycles require detection from a distance to prevent accidents. Attaching reflective tape can help prevent collisions with cars or other riders. Riders can also wrap the reflective tape around their ankles or arms to make them detectable while riding.
Types of Reflective Tape
-
Regular Reflective Tape
Regular reflective tape is suitable for metal or painted metal surfaces. It’s made of an acrylic-prismatic-reflective film, which lasts up to seven years once you paste it on a vehicle.
-
Engineer Grade Reflective Tape
- Flexible Grade: Flexible grade type contains top-quality glass beads and flexible thin film, making it highly affordable and popular among businesses.
- Super Grade: Super grade is similar to the flexible grade, but it’s much brighter due to containing higher quality glass beads.
- Flexible High-Intensity Grade: This type of reflective tape contains high-intensity glass beads. Its stretching and rebounding features make it popular for using it on cylindrical objects, such as traffic cones and road barrels.
- High-Intensity Grade: High-intensity reflective tape has a honeycomb pattern that contains ultra high-intensity glass beads. Its reflection capacity is nearly three times higher than the flexible high-intensity grade.
-
Prismatic Type
- Daybright Prismatic Reflective: Daybright Prismatic Reflective tape has a unique pattern, making it super-reflective all day and night. You can paste it on your office and factory gates, emergency vehicles, and loading vehicles.
- Micro Prismatic: Micro prismatic is an air-backed type of reflective tape that illuminates extensively during daylight.
- Solas Prismatic: Solas prismatic is a marine-grade reflective tape visible over 2,000 feet. It’s thick, weather-resistant, and UV stabilized.
- Oralite Prismatic: Oralite prismatic is the second brightest reflective tape after the Solas type. You can use it on heavy industrial equipment and highway vehicles.
What Do Different Colors of Reflective Tape Mean?
Knowing the color indications of different reflective tapes is as important as knowing their usage in your business. They are detailed in the following chart:
| Reflective Tape Color | What it means |
| Blue | Indicates a permanent equipment location |
| Red | Indicates a non-compliant area that contains scraps, defective products, etc., or requires rework |
| Orange | Indicates a temporary place of storage |
| Yellow | Indicates a zone where work is going on |
| Green | Indicates a location of finished goods |
Now that you know what different colors of reflective tape mean about specific objects, products, and areas, you’re good to go with using them in your day-to-day business operation.
What Are the Reflective Tape Regulations for Business?
Using reflective tape in various facilities and objects within your business may get you in trouble if you’re not aware of the regulations. Below are a few regulatory instructions about using reflective tape:
-
Color & Size:
Sticking the reflective tape to your vehicles requires the appropriate size and color. For example, reflective tape for your vehicles should only be red and white. The dimensions should be 6 to 18 inches long and 2 to 4 inches wide.
-
Marking Positions:
You should place the reflective tape horizontally on the sides of trailers or trucks in evenly spaced sections and alternate red-white combinations. The lower rear section of the truck should be covered the same way, keeping a distance of 15 to 60 inches above the road. Stick white reflective tape to the upper rear corners so that it looks like an L shape.
-
Maintenance:
Cleaning your reflective tape wherever you’ve attached it is essential as dirty tape won’t absorb and reflect light as desired. So maintain a cleaning and wiping schedule to avoid low detection of your vehicles and objects.
End Note
Our article has covered the necessity and features of reflective tape for businesses so that you can use it wisely for your purposes.
Reflective tape enhances safety and productivity while saving you from legal and financial hassles. Ensuring the safety of commercial properties and products is getting trickier, so you must equip your business with the optimum tools such as reflective tape.
Consider getting reflective tape soon to get your office, factory, warehouse, and vehicles covered while minimizing accidents and losses.
