Lifting gear colour coding, and why sites keep getting it wrong

The idea is simple. Every inspection period gets a colour. Gear examined in that period is tagged or taped in that colour. Anyone on site can see from across the laydown yard whether a sling is current, without reading a single certificate.

How a working system looks

Pick four colours and rotate them on a fixed calendar so the colour tells you the period, not just that somebody looked at it. Tag the item at the point of examination, not later in the office. Record the tag reference against the certificate number, so a coloured tag can always be traced back to a document with a name on it.

Mistake one: colour without a register

A yard full of green tags and no register is a yard where nobody can say which of the forty slings were examined and which were tagged by a helper who found the tape. The colour is the shortcut. The register is the control. You need both.

Mistake two: colour applied to gear that failed

Rejected gear must leave the yard the same day it is rejected, cut up if it is a sling. Gear that is quarantined for later disposal has a way of walking back into circulation, and a rejected item with last period's colour still on it looks fine at a glance.

Mistake three: colour on gear with no identity

A sling with an unreadable label cannot be certified whatever colour it wears. If the WLL and the identification are gone, the item is scrap. This is the most common finding on any first inspection of an established yard, and it is usually a third of the tackle.

What to do with a yard you inherited

Segregate everything into three areas: has a readable label, does not have one, obviously damaged. The second and third groups get scrapped. The first group gets examined, tagged and entered into a register with a certificate number per item or per batch. It is a hard day and it fixes a problem that otherwise repeats every six months.