Industrial Hygiene for Management or a Single Hazard Course?
This course teaches the method. The courses beside it take one of the hazards it categorises and go all the way down.
- Industrial Hygiene Training for Management. The page you are on. Exposure limits, monitoring, the hierarchy of controls and the programmes around them.
- Chemical Safety. Hazard communication, safety data sheets and handling, at the level of the worker using the chemical. View the Chemical Safety
- Ergonomics Training for the Site Worker. The ergonomic category in detail: posture, lifting, repetition and the injuries they cause. View the Ergonomics Training for the Site Worker
- Heat Illness Prevention. One physical hazard end to end, from acclimatisation through to emergency response. View the Heat Illness Prevention
Take this one to build the programme. Take the others where a particular exposure is the live problem.
How Industrial Hygiene Training Ranks a Control
The hierarchy of controls is the spine of this course, and its argument is economic as much as technical.
- Eliminate. Remove the hazard and there is nothing left to manage. The course's example is moving to a lead free process rather than controlling lead exposure.
- Substitute. Failing that, swap the material for a less hazardous one. A low VOC paint in place of a high VOC one does more than any procedure written about the high VOC one.
- Engineer. Then engineer. The course puts local exhaust ventilation, which captures a contaminant at source, at an 80 to 95 percent reduction against 30 to 70 percent for general dilution. It costs capital and no ongoing behaviour.
- Administer, then PPE. Administrative controls and PPE come last because both depend on someone doing the right thing every time. The course's worked case puts a 120,000 dollar fume extraction system against 40,000 dollars a year of respirator programme, and the extraction system pays for itself in three years while removing the respirator from the welder's face.
That is the course's real point: the controls at the top of the hierarchy are usually the cheaper ones once you count the years.
