The food manufacturing and pharmaceutical sectors have used metal detectors for over fifty years now, where their use is virtually mandated by the product liability legislation and general food safety requirements. On the other hand the use of metal and needle detectors in the garment manufacture industry is quite new.

Just a couple of incidents in which broken needles turned up in children’s clothing during the early 1990s particularly one in which a baby’s face was scratched - very quickly alerted many retailers in Britain to the potential danger caused by broken needles left behind in garments. The risks this entailed, legal and financial, as well as loss of reputation, were sufficient to convince them of the need for implementing forrmal needle detection procedures which did not rely on human intervention alone.

As a result, their garment suppliers throughout the world were instructed to check all baby and children’s wear for metal contamination, with the help of metal detectors such as needle detectors, usually as part of an overall safety policy aimed at eliminating any opportunity for metal pieces like broken needles, from any source, to contaminate the clothing in the first place.

Now an increasing proportion of retailers are extending this instruction, of using conveyor type needle detectors, to other forms of clothing, as well as shoes, laying down a mandatory needle detection procedure and, like Japanese retailers who have insisted on this procedure for the last ten years, fining suppliers if metal contamination is found in clothing.

Shoes generally present a greater risk of needle breakage than garments, simply on the basis of material thickness and hardness. But there can be an additional problem in the form of staples used temporarily in sports shoes to secure soles and uppers during vulcanisation. Usually these are removed manually after the shoe is finished, but in recent metal detectors commissioning trials at a shoe manufacturer in Asia, three staples were found in the first 400 pairs through the machine.

Mindful of the cost when, fairly recently, a world-class athlete was injured by a staple in one of its shoes, the manufacturer concerned was able to breathe a sigh of relief that over 1 per cent of his production would not now be a potential liability!

If you would like to know more about digital metal needle detectors, contact York Detection Systems in the UK or one of our distributors nearest to you.