Rack protection is cheap relative to a replaced upright and very cheap relative to everything downstream of a collapse. It is also the part of a warehouse most often specified by whoever quoted the racking, which is not the same as specified for the traffic the building actually has.
These pages describe products and the standards that govern some of them — what a column guard does, what mesh decking is for, what AS 1657 requires of a mezzanine edge. That is a description of a market, not an assessment of your site.
Fitting protection does not make racking safe, and nothing here should be read as saying it does. Whether a particular installation is adequate for a particular building is a judgement for a competent person: see how racking inspection works in Australia.
AS 1657 governs fixed platforms, walkways, stairways and ladders — which is what actually applies to a mezzanine edge, a raised storage area or an access platform. It is a different standard from AS 4084, it covers a different thing, and conflating the two is common.
Most impact protection, by contrast, is not governed by a specific product standard at all. It is specified against the traffic: what trucks, how fast, how often, and where they turn. Which loops back to the forklift fleet.
13 guides
A column guard is a separate steel or polymer product bolted to the floor around the base of an upright, not part of the racking itself. It exists to take the hit before the upright does, and choosing one is a traffic question more than a catalogue lookup.
Barriers and bollards protect people, plant, buildings and infrastructure from a moving vehicle, not just racking. Where they go depends on what is standing behind them and what happens if a forklift reaches it.
Beams hold a pallet's weight; decking and support bars hold everything smaller than the pallet from falling through the gap between beams. They are a separate layer, chosen for what sits on the beam rather than the beam's own rating.
A mezzanine is a fixed platform, and the edge of one is a fall risk regardless of what it is built on top of. Handrail, kick rail and pallet gates are the three products that manage that edge, and the standard that governs them is a different one from the racking standard.
A forklift and a person occupying the same floor space at the same time is the single highest-consequence hazard in most warehouses. Everything on this page is about removing the chance of that overlap, physically, rather than relying on everyone paying attention all the time.
A load sign states a capacity for one particular configuration of racking, not a generic figure for the product. Change the configuration and the number on the sign can stop being true, whether or not anyone updates it.
Line marking tells everyone on the floor where things are meant to be: which strip is a walkway, where staging ends and an aisle begins, which zone is out of bounds. It communicates intent clearly. It does not enforce it.
Netting and backing mesh exist because things fall from height in a warehouse, and the highest-consequence version of that is something falling into an aisle where a person is standing or a truck is moving. These products manage where the fall lands, not whether racking is loaded correctly.
A pallet jams or hangs up, there is no order picker free, and someone climbs out of a truck onto the racking to sort it by hand. It is a widespread, quietly tolerated practice, and it is genuinely dangerous. There is no safe version of it.
A tin-shed warehouse on a 40-degree day gets genuinely dangerous, and workers commonly assume there is a legal temperature limit being breached. There generally is not one. What exists is a duty to manage heat as a hazard, and that duty is real.
Most warehouses have a near-miss reporting process. Most near misses still never get logged. The gap between the policy and the practice comes down to self-filtering, blame and effort, not a missing form.
A racking run built hard up against a wall looks efficient on the drawing, right up until an overhanging pallet or a forklift's mast starts marking, denting or genuinely damaging the wall behind it. It is a common, unglamorous problem with a handful of practical options.
Wire mesh decking and solid steel panel decking both close the gap between beam levels, but they are not interchangeable. Load type, debris and how water from an overhead sprinkler behaves are all part of the choice.