Should safety knives be considered PPE?

This article was written by Jarrod Streng, President and CEO of Safety Products Global.

SPG holds a portfolio of safety cutting tool brands serving manufacturing, distribution, food processing, healthcare, construction, and retail markets across North America.

Walk into almost any facility in North America and you'll see the same scene. Workers in cut-resistant gloves. Workers in safety glasses. Workers in steel-toed boots. And in the back pocket of nearly every one of them, a cutting tool. Often a folding knife. Sometimes a snap-off blade. Occasionally a fixed blade pulled out of a drawer that's been there since before anyone on the floor was hired.

The gloves are PPE. The glasses are PPE. The boots are PPE. The knife… the single most common source of laceration injuries in the workplace, is not.

It's worth asking why.

Because in most organizations, PPE categories trigger formal processes: hazard assessments, training protocols, documented selection criteria, replacement schedules, and leadership oversight. Cutting tools, despite being one of the most common sources of workplace lacerations, often bypass those systems entirely.

It's time the safety profession had this conversation seriously. The safety knife meets every functional definition of PPE, and treating it as anything less is costing workers and employers more than we admit.

What PPE actually means

OSHA defines PPE as equipment worn or used to minimize exposure to hazards that cause serious workplace injuries and illnesses. The hazard the equipment addresses can be physical, electrical, chemical, biological, or radiological. The defining characteristic of PPE is that it sits at the point of contact between the worker and the hazard, and reduces the risk of injury at that point.

By that definition, a cut-resistant glove is unambiguously PPE. It sits at the worker's hand. The hazard is a blade. The glove reduces the severity of contact between the two.

Now consider the engineered safety knife. It sits in the worker's hand. The hazard is the same blade. And a properly designed safety cutter, concealed, auto-retracting, finger-friendly, reduces the probability and severity of contact between the blade and any human tissue, including the user's own.

The traditional answer is that PPE is what protects the worker from the tool, while the tool itself sits in a different category. That distinction made sense when the cutting tool was a passive object, a sharpened edge held in a handle, with no engineered mitigation between the user and the cut. It makes much less sense for a modern safety cutter, where the engineering of the tool itself is what reduces the hazard.

In many facilities, workers receive formal glove training on day one but are handed cutting tools with little or no instruction beyond basic task expectations.

The case for treating cutting tools as PPE

Three arguments deserve a serious hearing.

The first is functional: An engineered safety cutter performs the same protective role as any piece of PPE, it sits at the point of contact and reduces injury severity. Concealed-blade designs prevent the blade from contacting skin during normal use. Blade-retracting mechanisms prevent blade contact when the user releases pressure. Safer ceramic blades reduce the cutting force applied to soft tissue while maintaining cut performance on target materials. These are protective engineering choices, not productivity features.

The second is statistical: Lacerations remain one of the most common recordable injuries in U.S. industry. Industry data places the average cost of a single laceration at roughly $46,000 when medical, lost-time, and indirect costs are included. The category of equipment most directly responsible for those injuries is the cutting tool itself. If we are willing to classify cut-resistant gloves as PPE because they reduce laceration risk, the logical extension is that the tool causing the laceration deserves the same scrutiny.

The third is procedural: PPE classification carries real consequences inside an organization. PPE programs require hazard assessments, documented selection rationale, training, fit and use protocols, and replacement schedules. Cutting tools, in most facilities, are subject to none of these. They are purchased through MRO, distributed without training, used until they fail, and replaced without review. If we accept that cutting tools are a leading cause of workplace injury, treating them with the same procedural discipline as the rest of the PPE program is not a stretch, it's overdue.

The objections, and what they get right

There are reasonable objections to formally classifying cutting tools as PPE.

The first is that PPE is, by regulatory tradition, something a worker puts on. A glove goes on the hand. A respirator goes on the face. A cutting tool is a hand tool, something the worker picks up and uses as part of a task. Folding it into the PPE category creates definitional problems for OSHA, ANSI, and corporate safety programs that have spent decades building around a different framework.

The second is that PPE is the last line of defense in the hierarchy of controls. Engineering controls and administrative controls come first. Classifying a tool that workers actively use as PPE risks blurring the line between hazard and mitigation.

Both are fair points. Neither one settles the question.

SPG’s Klever EcoExcelXD is designed to help reduce cut injuries. Source: Safety Products Global

The hierarchy of controls argument actually strengthens the case for taking cutting tools seriously, because the modern safety cutter is itself an engineering control; the design of the tool eliminates or reduces the hazard at the source. Whether we call it PPE, an engineering control, or both, the practical question is whether we are applying the same discipline to cutting tool selection that we apply to other equipment that sits between the worker and a recognized hazard.

And the definitional question (worn versus used) is exactly the kind of question the safety profession has resolved before. We resolved it with fall protection. We resolved it with hearing protection in active environments. We can resolve it here.

What changes when we treat cutting tools as PPE

The labels matter less than the practices they unlock. Treating cutting tools as PPE would change how facilities approach four things:

Hazard assessment: Cutting tasks would be assessed the same way other PPE-relevant hazards are: identified by task, matched to engineered controls, documented in writing.

Selection: Tools would be specified to the material application, safety preferences, and operational requirements rather than purchased on price. Concealed-blade for everyday cutting. Ceramic for longevity and sensitive environments. Metal-detectable where food safety and contamination risk demand it. The tool-to-task mismatch that quietly drives a meaningful percentage of laceration injuries would be addressed at the procurement stage.

Training: Cutting tools would come with the same expectation of training and documented competency that other PPE carries. Most workers have never received formal training on how to use a knife safely. That gap would close.

Replacement: Tools would be replaced on a defined schedule rather than at failure. A blade that has lost its edge is more dangerous than one that hasn't, because it requires more force to cut. PPE-grade discipline around replacement would address that directly.

The conversation worth having

The safety profession is overdue for a serious conversation about where the cutting tool fits in the modern PPE program. The data supports it. The engineering of modern safety cutters supports it. And the workers using these tools every day (the ones whose hands are in the path of the blade) deserve the same level of programmatic attention applied to every other piece of equipment that protects them.

Whether the cutting tool is formally classified as PPE under OSHA or ANSI is, in some ways, beside the point. What matters is whether we treat it that way in practice, with the same hazard assessment, selection rigor, training, and replacement discipline we apply to the gloves, the glasses, and the boots.

If the answer to that question is yes, the conversation about formal classification will follow naturally. If the answer is no, we should be honest about why.