In the recent years businesses have been getting a pounding from a weak economy and lack of demand and they have all been searching high and low for ways to reduce costs and to make sure all costs that are necessary give much greater benefit than they have ever before. For businesses that have industrial premises this means cutting costs on fittings and maintenance as this is one place they have wanted to cut costs for a long time.
The irony is that international prices for steel just seem to keep climbing higher and higher and at a time when most business are desperately trying to keep costs under control or ideally to cut them drastically, the prices of steel are ballooning and hence the prices of all kinds of steel fittings are also sky rocketing. One great alternative that more and more industries are now adopting is a material called fibre reinforced plastic. FRP fittings and FRP grating is the new hot thing. Gratings and fittings made of FRP have a huge number of advantages of which cost is the largest and most important one but the others are also quite compelling.
Some of the advantages of all kinds of fitting and gratings made out of FRP are as follows. The first is that they are very strong. A well made FRP grating has greater strength and can withstand blows and crush force to a much greater extent than even steel. The second is that unlike almost any kind of metal gratings and fittings, FRP is totally resistant to all kinds of industrial effluents and thus is great for industrial applications of all types. This resistance is an inherent property of FRP and unlike steel it needs no expensive coatings that need to be applied or reapplied at regular intervals or keep it from corroding. FRP is a fit it and forget it kind of material. It is also a fraction of the weight of steel which means it is much easier and cheaper to carry and install and unlike steel needs no heavy moving equipment to get the grating or fittings into place. For most use case scenarios two people can easily handle, manoeuvre and fit an FRP grating just fine. The last is that FRP has almost no resale value on the scrap market so you can be sure that there is very little incentive for anyone to ever steal your gratings and fittings even if they are in public areas. The final reason of course is that FRP costs literally a fraction of what steel does.