Your responsibility regarding personal protective equipment depends on your role. If you’re an employee, you’re required to wear PPE correctly, inspect it before each use, and report damage. If you’re an employer, you’re required to assess hazards, provide appropriate PPE, pay for it, and train workers how to use it. These obligations are set by federal workplace safety standards, and both sides share the load.
What Employees Are Required to Do
Once your employer provides PPE and trains you on it, the responsibility shifts to you in several important ways. You must wear the equipment whenever your job tasks require it, use it the way you were trained, and never use equipment that’s damaged or defective. Federal safety standards are explicit on that last point: defective or damaged PPE cannot be used, period.
Before you’re allowed to perform any work requiring protective equipment, you need to demonstrate that you understand your training and can use the gear properly. This isn’t a formality. It means you should know what hazards the equipment protects against, when it’s required, how to put it on and take it off correctly, how to adjust it for a proper fit, and how to recognize when it needs replacement. If any of that is unclear, it’s your responsibility to speak up before starting the task.
You’re also expected to take reasonable care of your equipment. That means storing it properly so it doesn’t degrade, cleaning it when needed, and alerting your supervisor when something is worn out or broken. If you intentionally damage or lose your PPE, your employer is not required to replace it at their expense.
What Employers Are Required to Do
Employers carry the heavier obligation. They must conduct a hazard assessment to identify workplace dangers, select the right PPE for each hazard, provide it to every affected worker, and pay for it. The rule is straightforward: employers cannot require workers to supply their own protective equipment. If an employee already owns suitable gear and voluntarily chooses to use it, that’s permitted, but it can never be mandatory.
The list of equipment employers must pay for includes hard hats, hearing protection, non-prescription safety glasses, goggles, face shields, welding gear, steel-toe rubber boots, and firefighting equipment, among others. There are a few narrow exceptions. Employers don’t have to pay for non-specialty steel-toe shoes or prescription safety glasses if the worker is allowed to wear them off the job. They also aren’t responsible for everyday clothing like long pants and work boots, weather gear like winter coats and sunscreen, or items worn for consumer safety like food-service hairnets.
Beyond providing the gear, employers must train each worker before that worker is expected to use PPE on the job. And when workplace conditions change, retraining is required.
How to Inspect Your Equipment
Checking your PPE before each use is one of the simplest and most important things you can do. What you’re looking for depends on the type of equipment.
- Gloves: Look for cracks, scrapes, lacerations, thinning, or discoloration. Any visible break through to the skin means the glove is compromised and should be replaced.
- Eye protection: Check lenses for chips, scratches, or scrapes that could impair visibility or weaken the lens. Inspect headbands and straps for fraying or loss of elasticity, since a loose fit defeats the purpose.
- Hard hats: Look for dents, cracks, or any deformation in the shell. Check the suspension system inside for tears or looseness.
- Respirators: Inspect seals, valves, and straps for wear. Cartridge and filter replacement depends on the specific chemical exposure, work rate, temperature, and humidity, so follow the change schedule your employer provides.
If anything looks questionable, don’t use it. The standard leaves no room for judgment calls on damaged equipment.
Putting On and Removing PPE Safely
The order in which you put on and take off protective equipment matters, especially in environments with chemical or biological hazards. The general principle is that the outside surfaces of your gear are contaminated after use, so you need to avoid touching them with bare skin during removal.
When removing gloves, grasp the outside of one glove with the other gloved hand and peel it off, then slide your bare fingers under the wrist of the remaining glove to remove it without touching the outer surface. For goggles or face shields, handle them only by the headband or ear pieces, since the front is contaminated. Gowns should be peeled away from the shoulders, turned inside out as you go, rolled into a bundle, and discarded. Masks and respirators come off last: grab only the ties or elastic bands, never the front of the mask.
Wash your hands immediately after removing all PPE. This step is non-negotiable regardless of the setting.
Why PPE Is the Last Line of Defense
PPE sits at the bottom of a five-level safety framework called the hierarchy of controls. The levels above it, in order of effectiveness, are eliminating the hazard entirely, substituting a less dangerous material or process, installing engineering controls like ventilation or machine guards, and using administrative controls like rotating workers or adjusting schedules.
The reason PPE ranks last is simple: it depends entirely on human behavior. Elimination, substitution, and engineering controls reduce exposure without requiring workers to do anything differently. PPE, on the other hand, only works when every person uses it correctly every single time. That takes ongoing effort from both workers and supervisors.
PPE can also be more expensive than it appears. While a single pair of gloves costs very little, outfitting multiple workers daily adds up quickly, often exceeding the cost of a one-time engineering fix. Employers are expected to use PPE when other controls can’t reduce the hazard to safe levels, while those other controls are being developed, or when no other option exists. It fills a critical gap, but it was never designed to be the entire safety plan.
When Respirator Cartridges Need Replacing
Respirator filters and cartridges deserve special attention because they lose effectiveness over time, and you can’t always tell by looking at them. You’re not allowed to rely on smell or taste as your primary signal that a cartridge is spent.
How long a cartridge lasts depends on several factors. A worker breathing at twice the normal rate will exhaust a cartridge in half the time. Higher temperatures reduce service life by roughly 1 to 10 percent for every 10°C increase. Humidity has an even bigger impact: at 65% relative humidity, a cartridge may last only half as long as it would at 50%. Above 85% humidity, service life drops by at least 50%.
As a general guideline for organic vapor cartridges, if the chemical has a boiling point above 70°C and the concentration is below 200 parts per million, you can expect roughly 8 hours of protection at a normal work pace. Lower concentrations extend that life significantly: cutting the concentration by a factor of 10 can increase service life by a factor of 5. Your employer should have a written change schedule that accounts for these variables. If you don’t know the schedule for your specific cartridges, ask before relying on them.