Ever since we were kids, we’ve been exposed to colors that have special, intuitive meanings. The red traffic signal means stop, and the green one means go. Teaching those basic concepts to small children helps keep them safe, by creating a predetermined association for each color.
The same holds true in industrial environments, where color coding is, perhaps, more valuable today than ever before. Today’s industrial operations generally handle more hazardous materials than ever before, while working faster and leaner. In addition, the diversity of culture and background of the American workforce has probably never been wider. From a social standpoint, more workers today seem to communicate in their native language than at any time in the past, making in-plant hazard advisories that much more difficult.