Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Occupational exposure limit
Summary
An occupational exposure limit is an upper limit on the acceptable concentration of a hazardous substance in workplace air for a particular material or class of materials. It is typically set by competent national authorities and enforced by legislation to protect occupational safety and health. It is an important tool in risk assessment and in the management of activities involving handling of dangerous substances. There are many dangerous substances for which there are no formal occupational exposure limits. In these cases, hazard banding or control banding strategies can be used to ensure safe handling.
Occupational Exposure Limits (OELs) have been established for airborne workplace chemicals by multiple regulatory and authoritative organizations around the world for well over 60 years now. With the changing regulatory arena, shifting centers of manufacturing growth, and the move towards a more global view on occupational hygiene issues, it is important for the Occupational Hygiene profession to understand the current and growing issues impacting the continued viability of OEL's in our professional practice.
Although peer-reviewed health-based OELs are preferred for establishing safe levels of exposure or for implementing adequate controls to provide worker protection, the lack of publicly available OELs have led to other sources of safe levels to protect workers. Industrial or Occupational Hygienists are often on the front line of anticipating and recognizing the hazards of chemical exposure for workers, and must assess the risk of exposure through the use of OELs so that proper control strategies can be implemented to keep workers below the OEL values. In the absence of OELs however, there are a variety of tools that can and should be used to assess exposure potential of workers. The "Hierarchy of OELs" provides a continuum of occupational exposure limit values that allow assessment of the risk of exposure in order to apply adequate controls.
Personal air sampling is routinely conducted on workers to determine whether exposures are acceptable or unacceptable.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.