UL Solutions employee Mark Titus tests the suction of a vacuum cleaner by measuring the weight of particles it can remove from a rug. | Photo by Savannah Gunter
Story by Savannah Gunter
TRT: 3:02
ANCHOR INTRO: Have you ever wondered how the products we use in our daily lives are regulated? Take a vacuum, for example. Why do we trust their ability to clean our floors?
<<Mark Titus talking about the process of testing a vacuum>> “So you weigh this empty, then weigh it afterwards to see how much it picked up and how much is left on the hard floor…”
<<vacuuming sound>>
TRACK 1: Mark Titus is part of a corporation called UL Solutions, which helps test, inspect, and certify products before they’re sold to consumers. UL Solutions is the evolution of the Underwriters Laboratories, which advanced usage and safety of products staring in 1893. Dwayne Sloan, the Technical Director of the Built Environment at UL Solutions and a 36 year member of the team, says it’s all about giving buyers efficient products and keeping people safe.
DWAYNE SLOAN: “you get to see the most innovative and new technologies come across your desk and it’s always, always something different. And so every day seems like it brings a new challenge. They bring something different to look at and have to investigate and be a part of.”
TRACK 2: Sloan says UL Solutions is part of product evolution, building code creation, automotive advancements, and lots in between. He says during his time in the fire protection department, he’s tested smoke detectors and cooking equipment by burning hamburgers–and even artificial Christmas trees.
DWAYNE SLOAN: “We literally went to the store and bought the trees, brought them and took them out of the box, fluffed them out, put them together, just like if we were having a celebration or whatever else…we got them all lined up and ready to go, and then one by one we burned them all up, right? There was just something really kind of like wild about that, that we were helping out and trying to find this truth at Christmas time, where people actually, unfortunately, do have, you know, bad things happen.”
TRACK 3: Sloan says safety expands to all seasons, and many aspects of daily life. Cooking breakfast,
<<cooking breakfast sound>>
getting into a car,
<<car door sound>>
and entering a building
<<room door sound>>
are things most of us do every day—and they’d be a lot harder without safety standards and product testing.
DWAYNE SLOAN: “We get into the laboratory and we literally have to sit there and say, what could happen, what wrong could happen with this product, and we have to kind of dream up the foreseeable hazards that that product could bring. What are the ways that it could be misused? What are the ways that it could be misinstalled or installed incorrectly? And once we define those, then we try to come up with tests to mitigate that hazard.”
TRACK 4: Sloan says his time problem solving at UL Solutions has made him feel more connected to the world.
DWAYNE SLOAN: “You can see the outcomes of your work and how it actually impacts the society. And because of that, we find this work extremely fulfilling.”
TRACK 5: Titus says every day has been different in his 7 years at UL Solutions.
MARK TITUS: “My favorite part sometimes is just the challenge of figuring out how to do it. We kind of have a tendency if they want to do a nonstandard test, we’ll see if we can do it. And we modify or create fixtures so we can help them out.”
TRACK 6 : There’s a lot of science behind vacuuming a rug, trusting a smoke detector, or even assembling a Christmas tree. But those simple tasks might not be possible without people like Titus and Sloan spending hours on their hands and knees trying to improve products and ensure safety. I’m Savannah Gunter reporting.
