Natural construction materials such as wood, stone and other raw materials can generate fine, respirable dust once cut and ground into on construction sites. The use of abrasive wheels, cutters or blades from many handheld and stationary machinery removes material from workpieces, creating hazardous airborne respirable dust.
Removing layers or entire surfaces during construction processes can pose serious risks for construction workers and other personnel. The use of heavy-machinery and mechanical tools disturb entire surfaces, leading to construction materials being destroyed into smaller, more respirable particulates, posing health concerns.
Mixing in construction often involves combining various raw components such as cement, sand and aggregates. Adding raw materials into the mixer, no matter what is being mixed, both grinds and mixes materials against each other and creates high levels of airborne respirable dust, presenting health risks if not managed correctly.
Using heavy-duty vehicles on construction sites (e.g. the use of bulldozers, cranes, trucks and forklifts) generates high levels of dust. Whilst all these vehicles are involved in building and demolition on construction sites, which in turn generates respirable dust, they also carry large amount of construction materials and settled dust across workplaces, spreading the risk further.
When respirable dust is generated on a construction site, it can become settled across workspaces if not properly managed. Poor maintenance and cleaning methods like dry sweeping often makes dormant dust can airborne again. As this dust may have been settled for a while and forgotten about, it’s often not managed effectively.
We know that there’s probably hundreds of things which need constant monitoring and checking over during your working day, and the constant safety of your workforce is likely one of the top priorities. But we’re here to help.
Adrian Eccles, Technical Product Manager here at Trolex, explains the most beneficial ways to know if you’re adequately protecting your employees against hazardous dusts.
A great place to start is utilising the services of a registered occupational hygienist. Have air monitoring undertaken on the premises to get a baseline idea of your risk environment with regard to dust and then implement the recommendations of the hygienist to start reducing your levels of exposure.
To support this approach and get the most from your investment in the hygienist, teams can use real-time dust monitoring technology to collect data about their workers’ exposure to risk.
Real-time monitoring will also notify them instantly if any alarm points are breached, which would indicate a failure in a control, or alert to a non-prescribed operating method being used by a worker.
Real-time monitoring effectively offers an extra layer of protection for the entire workplace. Rather than going into it blind, and depending on information from the hygienist, real-time monitoring supports all the work being done by the hygienist. Adrian also highlighted how personal real-time monitoring can be beneficial in a similar scenario:
“Personal real-time monitoring and the subsequent data has many benefits in the workplace. Not only should it be used in a multi-pronged approach to safety, but it can also be used as an educational and training tool. For example, by demonstrating best practices to workers, they can better understand how a subtle change in the way they complete a task can have a major impact on their exposure to risk from dust.
Real-time monitoring can highlight a worker who isn’t following the assigned procedure and is putting themselves and any others in the area at risk from dangerous levels of dust. And when information or alerts are displayed immediately on a screen, this adds real power to training efforts.”
Adrian also highlighted how important personal real-time monitoring can be, when engaging workers with the benefits of real-time data. If workers can see, in real-time, the dust levels they’re directly exposed to, not only do they know their workplace is taking care of them, but it’s also much more valuable than just being told ‘you’re at risk of hazardous dust exposure’ without any significant information or data to back it up. Adrian said:
“Personal, real-time monitoring gives confidence to workers that they’re being protected and that their employer is taking their health seriously. An organisations’ staff are their biggest asset, and this technology helps ensure that they’re being kept safe from harmful dust levels.
By keeping your employees safer, you’re also helping to protect your organisation by reducing the likelihood of negligence claims or breaches of safety legislation (and the cost implications and negative publicity that often come along with it).”
And it’s not just worker satisfaction and compliance, which adequately protecting your workforce through real-time monitoring can provide, as Adrian demonstrates:
“This real-time technology has been proven to lower costs for the businesses who implement it: at a car manufacturing plant in Europe, for example, real-time dust monitoring technology revealed that extractors were running too fast.
When they lowered the speed of the extraction units, they lowered their energy usage and costs. And at a large construction project, real-time dust monitoring technology helped regulate water suppression efforts, resulting in lower water and diesel usage, and reduced costs.”
So, is your workplace being adequately protected against dust? If you’re not regularly monitoring the effectiveness of your dust control measures and utilising the expertise of hygiene professionals, then you’re putting yourself and your workers at risk of hazardous dust exposure.
Real-time area dust monitoring, personal dust monitoring and silica monitoring can provide safety for workers in multiple ways. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach for how it’s required to be used, and the benefits can differ depending on who’s using it. No matter what industry, location or workplace it’s being deployed, real-time monitoring can protect your workers if there’s airborne dust at present.
Here’s 5 effective ways of deploying AIR X real-time particulate monitoring to your operations.
The ability to know in real-time when dust exposure limits are breached and to see all the data your real-time dust monitor picks up throughout your working day allows you to find the root of your dust problem. With Audio/Visual alarms and live readings for dust level breaches, you can deduce exactly which processes are causing excess dust levels. Similarly, by viewing data over full shifts and seeing when dust levels are highest, you can deduce what processes were completed at that time, to find the root of your dust problem. By finding the root of your dust problem, effective control measures can then be introduced.
AIR X real-time particulate monitors have a single-user configurable Audio/Visual alarm that can be used to warn users of a specific particulate threshold breaches based on a chosen limit or value. For example, in the UK, the Workplace Exposure Limit for Respirable Crystalline Silica is 0.1 mg/m3 over an 8-hour period. A customisable alarm set on your Trolex AIR XS Silica Monitor will alert you in real-time if the threshold is breached during your working day. This allows you and your workforce to work as normal throughout your day, knowing that you’ll be alerted as soon as you’re set limits are breached.
AIR X real-time particulate monitoring technology can be deployed as either fixed, area or personal monitoring, so workers in any location of your workplace can monitor for dust in real-time. Deploying a combination of Trolex real-time personal dust monitoring, area dust monitoring and real-time silica monitoring across your workplace operations allows for all areas of the workplace to consistently monitor for excess dust, as well as deduce which areas of the workplace are at higher risk of dust exposure.
All our AIR X technology has supporting software to view all live and historical data. Breathe Software for AIR XD, BreatheXS for AIR XS and BreatheLITE and BreatheMOBILE for XD1+ allows you to view data as it happens and view up to 10-years’ worth of data, so you can consistently track any changes as they happen over time. By viewing all the data your dust monitor picks up, you can see when dust levels peak and from this deduce the most effective control measures that need to be introduced in line with what process cause the spike and where this was occurring.
The ability to know in real-time when dust exposure limits are breached and to see all the data your AIR X particulate monitor picks up throughout your working day means you can work in-line with the Hierarchy of Controls, to eliminate or substitute the hazard, and introduce control measures for excess dust. By finding the root of your dust problem through real-time dust monitoring, you can not only introduce dust control measures to eliminate or reduce exposure to dust but can also effectively monitor your control measures to see how effective they’re working, and make vital and supported business decisions if further changes are required.
Knowing you have a dust problem is one thing. Being able to do something effective about the problem is another. Thanks to Trolex real-time AIR X particulate monitoring technology, all the data collected can be accessed, viewed and interrogated to make vital business decisions and actively protect you and your worker’s health.
Here’s 5 effective ways of using our AIR X particulate monitoring software.
The ability to see dust levels in real time allows all workers to deduce whether you, your workers and your occupational environments are safe. Respirable dust is smaller than 10 μm meaning it’s invisible to the human eye, yet it’s so finite that it can easily be breathed in and penetrate the lungs. You may be breathing in respirable dust and putting your respiratory health at risk without even knowing it. But with real-time dust data, you can know exactly how much dust you’re exposed to throughout your working day and introduce the necessary steps to protect your respiratory health.
Real-time dust data isn’t just available for live readings in real time. Compatible with all our real-time monitoring technology, our AIR X software allows you to visualise the data your AIR X particulate monitor picks up, so you can track trends in the dust levels your workers are exposed to over a period of time in your working day, week, month or year to determine whether you and your workers have been exposed to potentially hazardous substances over that period.
Our dedicated AIR X software allows you to personalise all the relevant settings for your Trolex real-time particulate monitor. By alerting you to dust levels relevant to your local legislative dust limits, AIR X real-time monitoring technology ensures all real-time data is effective and valuable to whatever occupational environment you are working in. AIR X software lets you set dust levels specific to your environment and workplace to ensure you’re constantly monitoring for dust levels in the most effective way possible.
Our real-time dust data allows you to see trends in your dust levels over a personalised time periods and subsequently introduce vital control measures to effectively manage and control dust. AIR X software ensure you can determine at what time peak dust levels occurred during your working day and deduce what activities were taking place during this time, so you can introduce relevant and effective control measures to prevent future dust from becoming airborne at this time.
After introducing control measures, you can continue to use real-time dust data through AIR X software to see how effective these control measures are in controlling dust. If you can’t continually track dust levels over time, it’s impossible to know if your control measures are working effectively, which could cost money, time and most importantly harm your health and wellbeing. However, thanks to AIR X software, you can see how dust levels are affected by introducing control measures and subsequently make vital decisions to continue to control dust exposure.
