7.3 PPE Care, Inspection, and Decontamination

Selection mistakes show up on the label quiz. Care mistakes show up as a rash on Friday or a child sitting on a truck seat that rode home in contaminated coveralls. Mix/load pads in Edmond, boom sprayers on a Norman golf course, roadside Category 6 tanks, and Category 7A indoor routes all share the same closeout: inspect, wear in an order that keeps the face clean, wash or discard, and store the next day's gear away from product.

Inspect before every use

Chemical-resistant gloves, boots, aprons, and suit materials are polymers. Solvents swell them, ultraviolet light stiffens them, and crease lines crack. Before you open a jug:

• Hold gloves up to light or inflate them and squeeze. A pin-sized leak is a dermal dose on the palm, where most mixer exposure already occurs.
• Flex boots and look at the ankle crease and sole bond. Discard if they leak or the liner is wet from yesterday.
• Look at reusable suits and aprons for chalking, tackiness, discoloration, and seam tape lift.
• Check goggle vents, faceshield visors, and respirator valves and gaskets. A missing inhalation valve turns a half-face respirator into a leaky cup.
• Confirm cartridge expiration dates and that sealed replacements are actually on the truck, not back at the shop.

If the inside of a glove is stained, sticky, or smells like product, treat it as contaminated inside. Replace it. Schedule replacement even when gloves still look intact: reuse until they fail is not a chemical-resistance strategy. Keep a dated spare set in a clean container, not stuffed in the same crate as measuring cups.

Donning and doffing without dosing your face

Don in a clean area, on the upwind side of the mix pad or outside the restaurant mechanical room.

A practical donning order:

1. Inspect everything. Remove jewelry that tears gloves.
2. Put on work clothes, then coveralls or the chemical-resistant suit.
3. Put on chemical-resistant boots with pant or suit legs over the boot tops.
4. Put on the respirator if required, then complete both a negative- and a positive-pressure user seal check.
5. Put on protective eyewear if you are on a half-face respirator or if the label requires eyewear and you are not on a full-face piece.
6. Put on the apron for mix/load or repair.
7. Put on chemical-resistant gloves last so you do not contaminate the inner surfaces while dressing. For work with hands down (measuring, boom at waist height), sleeves over glove cuffs. For overhead spray, gloves over sleeves with a one- to two-inch cuff fold to catch runoff.

Doffing is where people wipe concentrate onto lips and eyelids. The goal is to peel dirty surfaces away from skin and to keep dirty gloves off the face.

1. Still wearing gloves, wash the glove exteriors with soap and water at the pad.
2. Remove the apron and any other heavily splashed outer layer, folding contaminated faces inward.
3. Wash the gloves again.
4. Remove boots so you do not track mix-pad mud into the truck. Wash gloves again.
5. Remove eyewear, then the respirator, by the straps—not by grabbing the dirty facepiece and dragging it across your mouth. Do this after the dirtiest body PPE is already off so you are not hugging a soaked apron against your cheek while unclipping a mask.
6. Peel the suit or coveralls inside-out.
7. Remove the gloves last, then wash hands and face with soap and water. Shower at the end of the day, including hair and under nails.

If product gets under a glove or onto skin during the job, stop the task, wash immediately, and replace the gear. Do not finish the remaining jugs first.

WPS handler employers must provide a clean place to store personal clothing and to put on and take off PPE, and they must not allow handlers to take contaminated PPE home. Even when WPS does not cover a 7A or right-of-way crew, taking a soaked coverall into a family vehicle is how indoor surfaces and kids get dosed. Change at the shop or on the pad.

Wash, replace, dispose, and store

Reusable elastomeric gear (gloves, boots, aprons, goggles, respirator facepieces) gets a soap-and-water wash. Wash gloves before they come off, then wash insides and outsides once they are off. Hang to dry out of direct sun; ultraviolet light ages rubber. Clean respirator facepieces per the manufacturer, including around valves. Remove spent filters and cartridges before washing the facepiece so you do not soak sorbent and then store a wet contaminated cartridge.

Woven work clothes and coveralls go through a dedicated wash:

• Outdoors, shake dry granules from cuffs and pockets and air the garments.
• Wash only pesticide clothing in that load. Never mix them with family laundry, team uniforms, or restaurant staff shirts from a 7A service van.
• Use hot water, heavy-duty detergent, a high water level, and a long cycle. Lightly or moderately soiled items often need two full cycles.
• Line dry in sun when you can; dryer drums hold residue.
• Run an empty hot detergent cycle before anyone uses that washer for household clothes.

If a commercial laundry handles the garments, tell them the clothes carry pesticide residue. WPS requires the handler employer to inform anyone who cleans PPE about the pesticide hazards and about decontamination after handling the gear. The person who handles heavily contaminated items wears the mixer/loader gloves specified for those products.

Do not wash absorbent clothes that were drenched or heavily contaminated with undiluted product or large volumes of spray, especially when the signal word is DANGER or WARNING. WPS says those coveralls and other absorbent materials must not be reused. Render them unusable as clothing and dispose of them following the label and applicable waste rules. Cutting them up so nobody wears them home is part of making them unusable. Disposable coveralls that cannot be cleaned get the same treatment.

Replace gloves on a schedule and the moment they fail inspection, leak, or become contaminated inside. Boots last longer if you wash them and keep them out of the sun, but they are not lifetime gear.

Store clean PPE in a closed container or locker away from pesticide containers, measuring cups, and the mix-pad floor. A sealed respirator bag on the same shelf as an open EC jug is how OV cartridges start loading before the workday. Do not park clean gloves on the truck dash over a concentrate box.

Eyewash at mix/load and decontamination water

Eyes absorb pesticide quickly. When WPS applies and a handler is mixing or loading a product whose labeling requires protective eyewear—or mixing or loading any pesticide through a closed system under pressure—the handler employer must provide, immediately available at each mixing/loading site:

• a system that delivers gently running water at least 0.4 gallons per minute for at least 15 minutes, or
• at least six gallons of water in containers that can provide a gentle eye flush for about 15 minutes.

A pint bottle in the cup holder does not meet that mix/load eyewash rule. A pint per handler in a portable container is the separate WPS supply for applicators when the label requires protective eyewear during application. Keep mix-pad eye-flush water at a temperature and quality that will not injure eyes. Do not draw decontamination water from the same tank you use to mix product unless anti-backflow protection is in place.

WPS also requires general handler decontamination supplies: at least three gallons of water per handler at the start of the work period, soap, single-use towels, and clean clothing for emergencies, at the mix site and where PPE is removed.

Even on jobs WPS does not cover, build the same habit at an Oklahoma turf shop or 7A warehouse: soap, towels, a change of clothes, and a real ability to flush eyes for minutes, not seconds, where concentrate is poured.

Close the loop the same way after a Category 3A tank fill, a Category 6 roadside day, or a Category 7A indoor route. Intact gear, a donning order that keeps gloves last, a doffing order that keeps contamination off the face, laundry that never meets the family load, disposal when gear is spent, and storage that does not sit in the chemical plume. PPE is a system. A cracked nitrile glove in an otherwise perfect ensemble is still a failed system.