Industrial Hygiene Control of Airborne Chemical Hazards, Second Edition

William Popendorf

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351238038
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Health & Safety
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Are you a practicing occupational hygienist wondering how to find a substitute organic solvent that is safer to use than the hazardous one your company is using? Chapter 6 is your resource. Are you a new hygienist looking for an alternative technology as a nonventilation substitute for an existing hazard? Chapter 8 is your resource. Are you looking for an overview of ventilation? Chapters 10 and 11 are your resource? Are you an industrial hygiene student wanting to learn about local exhaust ventilation? Chapters 13 through 16 are your resource. Are you needing to learn about personal protective equipment and respirators? Chapters 21 and 22 are your resources. This new edition brings all of these topics and more right up-to-date with new material in each chapter, including new governmental regulations.

While many of the controls of airborne hazards have their origins in engineering, this author has been diligent in explaining concepts, writing equations in understandable terms, and covering the topics of non-ventilation controls, both local exhaust and general ventilation, and receiver controls at the level needed by most IHs without getting too advanced. Taken as a whole, this book provides a unique, comprehensive tool to learn the challenging yet rewarding role that industrial hygiene can play in controlling airborne chemical hazards at work.

Most chapters contain a set of practice problems with the solutions available to instructors.

Features

• Written for the novice industrial hygienist but useful to prepare for ABIH certification
  
  

• Explains engineering concepts but requires no prior engineering background
  
  

• Includes specific learning goals that differentiate the depth of learning appropriate to each topic within the fuller information and explanations provided for each chapter

• Contains updated governmental regulations and abundant references
  
  

• Presents a consistent teaching philosophy and approach throughout the book
  
  

• Deals with both ventilation and non-ventilation controls
  
  

1 An Introduction to Industrial Hygiene Chemical Hazard Control

This chapter starts with an introduction to both the professional practice of industrial hygiene [IH] and the organization of this book. The chapter then elaborates sequentially on how all airborne exposures can be placed within a handful of scenarios defined in terms of the spatial distance between the source of the airborne agent and the person being exposed, how the book follows the IH paradigm that prioritizes reducing exposures first by controlling preferentially the source, then by modifying the pathway, and least desirably by personal protection of the receiver. The last section of the chapter explains this book’s use of learning goals and special notations intended to focus one’s reading of a broad range of topics into the nuggets that must be thoroughly understood and the few that are memorable.

I An Overview of Industrial Hygiene

Readers will come to see that this author likes to start chapters with definitions. This seems like a good way to get everyone on the same page (meant more figuratively than literally). The formal definition of industrial hygiene [IH] not only provides a guide to how the profession is usually taught, learned, and practiced but in this context also provides insight into the structure of this book. While this definition may appear at first glance to be just words, to the experienced hygienist each of these phrases has a significant meaning that will be discussed in detail below.

Industrial hygiene is both the science and art

devoted to the Anticipation, Recognition, Evaluation, and Control

of those environmental factors or stresses

arising in or from the workplace

which cause sickness, impaired health, significant discomfort or inefficiency

among workers or among citizens of the community.

Certainly, “science” differs from the “art” of any human venture. The need to use both is crucial in an applied science such as IH. The student who can excel in the science classroom or during an examination may not necessarily be creative in applying these concepts, effective at conveying new ideas or at convincing others to change, or comfortable working in an advisory capacity as any industrial hygienist must. On the other hand, someone who is good at selling ideas but does not have the scientific knowledge to make valid (let alone cost-effective) decisions will not succeed as an industrial hygienist either. The best hygienists are good at both the science and the art. (Someone who is or who wants to be good at only one thing may be trying to enter the wrong profession.) Good industrial hygienists have a wide range of both technical and interpersonal skills. It is partly this diversity that makes IH an interesting profession.

The next phrase of the definition that says the profession is devoted to four functions implies that the practice of IH is best viewed as progressing from one of the following functions to the next:

• Anticipation: the prospective recognition of hazardous conditions based on chemistry, physics, engineering, and toxicology
• Recognition: both the detection and identification of hazards or their adverse effects through chemistry, physics, and epidemiology
• Evaluation: the quantitative measurement of exposure to environmental hazards and the qualitative interpretation of those hazards
• Control: conception, education, design, and implementation of beneficial interventions carried out that reduce, minimize, or eliminate hazardous conditions

IH is typically taught in this same sequence of functions. A course centered on this book would fall squarely into the control function. This list of functions makes IH sound nicely organized if not compartmentalized, but, in fact, a practicing hygienist’s day may easily be fragmented into some of each of these functions; and while working at one function, the IH practitioner needs to use or be cognizant of all the other functions and keep that framework of multiple functions clearly in the back of their mind. To leave any of these functions completely alone is to court professional failure.

The range of stressors with which IH deals is wide, which also contributes to job satisfaction. Hygienists often group stressors into the categories such as those listed below. Although some might argue that the last category is not really an environmental factor, most would agree that psychological factors at work can be stressors. This book focuses on the control of chemical hazards and predominantly upon airborne chemical hazards, although many of the principles presented also apply to airborne biological hazards.

• Chemical: gases, vapors, dusts, fumes, mists, solvents
• Physical: barometric pressure, temperature, noise, vibration, nonionizing, and ionizing radiation
• Biological: bacteria, fungi, parasites, and their toxins (although toxins are also chemicals)
• Ergonomic: the interaction of machine design and operational practices with our human anatomy
• Mechanical: primarily safety (injury, fatality, property damage)
• Psychological: peer pressure, job security and satisfaction, education, and motivation

The IH profession’s focus on factors and stressors arising in versus from the workplace has varied over the years. In its origin, IH was a branch of public health that was rooted in the workplace. However, what starts within the boundaries of the workplace often crosses the fence-line to enter the surrounding community. Thus, the practice of IH has historically oscillated between a narrow focus on employees within the plant to a wider interest in air and water emissions, solid waste, and physical hazards that leave the workplace. The reference within the definition to two settings and later to two groups of people reflects IH’s broad responsibilities rather than a narrow focus.

People in both settings can respond to health hazards in a variety of ways, from fatalities (not explicitly in the definition) to sickness, impaired health, significant discomfort or inefficiency, or even outrage. It is interesting to speculate why fatalities on the high end of the response spectrum were left out of the definition of IH. Outrage, expressed as either a personal or community response to a hazard, is a dimension with which the IH profession has only recently become aware. The level of subjective outrage is often irrespective of either the quantitative health hazard or the spectrum of response listed above, but as Peter Sandman advocates, it is just as measurable and often just as important to the mission or goal of a company or agency as is the objective health hazard.^{1, 2 and 3} This wide spectrum of adverse health effects is also important to keep in mind when trying to set priorities among multiple health hazards, and is a key factor underlying the adage that “not all exposure limits are created equal.”

Not all IH work is quantitative. While the roots of IH are based on science, very little day-to-day IH work is quantitative. This apparent dichotomy is reflected in a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted counts.” Not only is much of IH an art, the science of IH has limits to its knowledge. Take exposure limits for example (Chapter 4): each exposure limit is our best quantitative indicator of a chemical’s toxicity at the time it was adopted. However, most exposure limits have changed at least once owing to new knowledge or interpretations. In fact, we are forced to use judgment in each of the four functions of IH: to anticipate the effects of new chemicals, to recognize a widening spectrum of adverse health responses, to evaluate current exposures and the links between historic exposures and reported health effects, and to control exposures in the diverse settings in which people work.

Industrial hygienists do not go around personally controlling workplace hazards, at least not often. The practice of IH is a management function that involves multiple tasks and activities from quantitative exposure assessment to human and public relations, the supervision of technical staffs, financial planning and accountability, and documentation (that means lots and lots of writing). Management skills are talked about in some classes but are difficult to learn in the classroom. They build on character but rely on experience. The ability of industrial hygienists to extend their knowledge and apply judgment and management skills, rather than just plugging data into a formula, is another personal reward of practicing the profession.

Yet another personal reward is the satisfaction of doing something in one’s own life that can make a positive difference to someone else’s life. For industrial hygienists, that other someone else is ostensibly the employees, but good preventive health decisions also benefit the employers who might not otherwise make good choices for themselves and the community who might not otherwise have any advocate within the workplace. While the functions of anticipation, recognition, and evaluation are essential to IH and are necessary precursors to control, it is only by controlling a hazard that anyone can actually make a positive change. It is only after a control has been implemented that exposures and the risks of adverse health effects are reduced, and we can say that we have made a positive difference.

Some IH jobs such as consulting or OSHA enforcement focus on recognition or evaluation but rarely provide the opportunity to implement feasible and cost-effective solutions in a specific workplace that affects individual employees. IH researchers usually only see their findings implemented years later via new policies, methods, or technologies. It is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Author
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Conversion Factors
• Chapter 1 An Introduction to Industrial Hygiene Chemical Hazard Control
• Chapter 2 The Behavior of Gases and Vapors
• Chapter 3 The Behavior of Aerosols
• Chapter 4 Control Criteria for Airborne Chemicals
• Chapter 5 Vapor Generation, Behavior, and Hazards
• Chapter 6 Vapor Pressure within Mixtures
• Chapter 7 Changing the Workplace
• Chapter 8 Source Control via Substitution
• Chapter 9 Other Source and Nonventilation Pathway Controls
• Chapter 10 An Overview of Local Exhaust Ventilation
• Chapter 11 Ventilation Flow Rates and Pressures
• Chapter 12 Measuring Ventilation Flow Rates
• Chapter 13 Designing and Selecting Local Exhaust Hoods
• Chapter 14 Predicting Pressure Losses in Ventilation Systems
• Chapter 15 Exhaust Air Cleaners and Stacks
• Chapter 16 Ventilation Fans
• Chapter 17 Ventilation Operating Costs
• Chapter 18 Local Exhaust Ventilation System Management
• Chapter 19 General Ventilation and Transient Conditions
• Chapter 20 General Ventilation in Steady-State Conditions
• Chapter 21 Administrative Controls and Chemical Personal Protective Equipment
• Chapter 22 Respirator Controls
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Index