Is Your Workplace Air Safe to Breathe?

Airborne contaminants come in many varieties, such as fumes, vapors, dusts, and gases. But they all have one thing in common—they can be hazardous to the health of your employees. So, if there are respiratory hazards in the air, you have to have a plan to minimize exposure.

What is the identity and nature of the airborne contaminant? Protecting employees from airborne hazards begins with fully understanding the risks. To do that, OSHA says you have to ask some critical questions. For example:

• Is the airborne contaminant a particulate (dust, fumes, mist, aerosol) or a gas/vapor?
• Is it a chemical, and if so, is there a material safety data sheet (MSDS) available?
• Is the airborne hazard biological (bacteria, mold, spores, fungi, or virus)?
• Are there any mandatory or recommended occupational exposure levels for the contaminant?

How much employee exposure is there? OSHA allows you to use different approaches for estimating worker exposures to respiratory hazards. Key among them is sampling. OSHA calls personal exposure monitoring the “gold standard” for determining employee exposures because it’s the most reliable way to assess how much and what type of hazard each employee is actually exposed to. Sampling should:

• Use methods appropriate for contaminants(s).
• Present the worst-case exposures.
• Represent enough shifts and operations to determine the range of exposure.

In addition to, or sometimes in place of, sampling, OSHA says you may rely on “information and data on the physical and chemical properties of air contaminants, combined with information on room dimensions, air exchange rates, contaminant release rates, and other pertinent data, including exposure patterns and work practices, to estimate the maximum exposure that could be anticipated in the workplace.”

Data from industrywide surveys by trade associations for their members, as well as from stewardship programs operated by manufacturers for their customers, may also be good sources of objective information on employee exposures.

What action must you take to protect employees? On the basis of the information obtained from sampling and other sources, you can develop a strategy for minimizing harmful exposures to airborne contaminants. For example:

• Engineering controls, such as general ventilation systems, exhaust hoods, etc., to bring concentrations down to safe levels
• Administrative controls, such as limiting work time in certain environments, to reduce exposure
• Respiratory protection to filter out specific air contaminant(s) when concentrations can be brought down to safe levels by other means

Why It Matters…

• Workplace air contaminants are capable of causing serious illness.
• Unprotected exposure to high concentrations of some air contaminants can be fatal.
• OSHA requires you to monitor air quality when respiratory hazards are present and take appropriate steps to protect employees from harmful exposures.

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