by Brianna Crandall — November 22, 2013—Facilities managers who deal with any kind of hazardous chemicals at work may have experienced the statistic that each year in the United States, tens of thousands of workers are made sick or die from occupational exposures to the thousands of hazardous chemicals that are used in workplaces every day. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has launched two new Web resources to assist companies with keeping their workers safe from these exposures.
While many chemicals are suspected of being harmful, OSHA says that its exposure standards are out-of-date and inadequately protective for the small number of chemicals that are regulated in the workplace. Since the most efficient and effective way to protect workers from hazardous chemicals is by eliminating or replacing those chemicals with safer alternatives whenever possible, according to OSHA, the first resource the agency has created is a toolkit to identify safer chemicals that can be used in place of more hazardous ones.
Transitioning to Safer Chemicals: A Toolkit for Employers and Workers walks employers and workers step-by-step through information, methods, tools and guidance to either eliminate hazardous chemicals or make informed substitution decisions in the workplace by finding a safer chemical, material, product or process.
OSHA also created another new Web resource, the Permissible Exposure Limits — Annotated Tables , or annotated PEL tables, which will enable employers to voluntarily adopt newer, more protective workplace exposure limits. OSHA’s PELs set mandatory limits on the amount or concentration of a substance in the air to protect workers against the health effects of certain hazardous chemicals, and OSHA says it will continue to enforce those mandatory PELs.
However, since OSHA’s adoption of the majority of its PELs more than 40 years ago, new scientific data, industrial experience and developments in technology clearly indicate that in many instances these mandatory limits are not sufficiently protective of workers’ health. OSHA advises employers to utilize the occupational exposure limits on the new annotated tables to ensure the safety of their workers.
The annotated PEL tables provide a side-by-side comparison of OSHA PELs for general industry to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health PELs, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommended exposure limits, and American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienist threshold limit values. They offer an easily accessible reference source for up-to-date workplace exposure limits.
