Prismatic Tape – The Only Option When It Comes To Safety?

As we all know, it’s Road Safety Week, and as a corporate partner of Brake, we’ll be blogging all week in support of the fantastic work they do. At Keltic, we put a significant amount of our profits back in to road safety. In line with Brake’s road safety messages, we thought we would take this opportunity to highlight some new reflective tape technology that we feel should be more widely used in our industry.

Our School Crossing Patrol do such a great job keeping our children safe, and their high visibility jackets obviously contribute to this. What we find exciting is that a new garment tape technology – prismatic tape – is now available which allows wearers to be seen up to 7 times further away than glass bead tape. Glass bead tape is the older, less reflective ‘plain’ looking silver tape that can still be seen on many garments.

Just as exciting is the fact that prismatic tape also retains its reflectivity for the lifetime of the garment and gives exceptional performance in the rain. With the older technology (glass bead), tests show that the glass beads wear off over time and with washing, so the reflective values drop dramatically after wearing and washing which is clearly a concern.

The reflectiveness of glass bead tape is also dramatically reduced in the rain. At last week’s Road Safety GB conference, we demonstrated how glass bead tape ‘blacks out’ in areas where rain hits it. With the amount of rain we get in this country, and the fact that school crossing patrol staff work in all weathers, that’s also a concern.

With this in mind, should all School Crossing Patrol’s be wearing  Prismatic Tape?