USO DEL COLORE PER IL MIGLIORAMENTO DELL'EFFICIENZA E DEL COMFORT IN SITI DI PRODUZIONE ALIMENTARE INDUSTRIALE

Use of Color to enhance the efficiency and Comfort in Food Prodcution Plants The need for companies to improve working conditions grows more and more to increase the welfare perceived by the worker. It’s often related to environmental conditions of the place of work. The environmental quality depends on the measured relationship between the acoustic, thermal, visual and olfactory elements. These include light and colour that can become welfare instruments. Colour is also the source of the greatest emotional charge that a place can offer: it creates, particularly, an atmosphere that can give to the worker beneficial effects through activated synesthetic phenomenons and its electromagnetic energy. The purpose of my PhD research is to define the discomfort in three production plants of the Ready to Use Sector and Frozen Products Sector, find out the typical problems and analyse light and colour to determine possible alternative of colour solutions. Colours are already present on the plants, but after a careful study I am going to redefine them in order to increase the welfare of the worker and the pleasantness of his environment. At the same time these new colours promote and facilitate his concentration, his performance and his safety. Last but not least men work with more pleasure when they are in a coloured and pleasant place. In the third case of my research I studied colours of belt conveyors which transfer spinach in an important Italian frozen products company. The most used belt colour is blue, but after many analysis, with Color Analyzer, I found out that blue is not the best belt colour for the manual selection of spinach. In fact workers, watching the blue belt colour during the manual selection, stress their eyes enhancing their discomfort.