Patty's Industrial Hygiene, Hazard Recognition. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ in order to prevent or minimize negative impacts and maximize value. Many industrial hygienists through their traditional work have become increasingly involved in this affiliated area of professional practice.

      Product Stewardship is a significant regulatory, health, and environmental protection activity increasingly required for all commercial entities that create, market, transport, import, or dispose of commercial products of all types. Many of the major chemical manufacturing, processing, and distribution companies are committed to performance programs through their various trade associations. All of these programs define elements and expectations for Product Stewardship. The number and complexity of Product Stewardship related regulations continue to grow globally with the implementation of Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS), expanded Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Chemical Data Reporting requirements and a growing list of participating countries implementing chemical control regulations impacting global commerce. The typical qualifications and capabilities of a professional industrial hygienist compare well with the competency requirements for the practice of Product Stewardship.

      In general, there are no specific or consensus definitions of Product Stewardship. In fact, some use the term product safety to describe the same set of activities and principles. However, an analysis of publicly available documents can give a clear sense of the common elements and lead one to an understanding of the principals involved. The Product Stewardship Society uses the following definition:

      Responsibly managing the health, safety and environmental aspects of raw materials, intermediate and consumer products throughout their life cycled across the value chaining order to prevent and minimize negative impacts and maximize value.

      Product Stewardship has certain basic activities which are rooted in regulatory requirements:

       hazard assessment

       hazard communication

       product exposure assessments

       risk management

       product development.

      Whether defined as a set of principles, a program, a tool, a policy, or a process, the focus is a safe product of acceptable risk. The risk management of products throughout their life cycle requires an integrated organizational approach. This means a close relationships with customers and others involved in the supply chain are required to make Product Stewardship principles happen in the real world. Drivers for these activities are regulatory, moral, and ethical in nature.

      It is clear that implementing Product Stewardship takes a cross‐functional approach and affects many departments or functions in a company. This requires significant effort in a company to maintain an understanding of each function's role and to assure each function is performing the activities needed. Furthermore, the Product Stewardship function itself can be comprised of several distinct disciplines including Toxicology, Occupational Medicine, Industrial Hygiene, and Regulatory Affairs. If specialists in these fields are not within the Product Stewardship function of an organization, the different forms of expertise will need to be available, or those doing Product Stewardship will need to develop a working proficiency in the mentioned areas. This is a challenge which with Occupational Hygienists are familiar. It is quite normal for a hygienist to bring together engineering, management, hourly, and union personnel to solve a problem or implement a solution. These skills and experience translate well to working in a Product Stewardship program.

      IH professionals practice health protection and regulatory compliance in a framework which is different from, yet closely related to, Product Stewardship. Many of the technical and experiential competencies required for Product Stewardship are commonly possessed by Occupational Hygienists.

      4.2 Advances in Exposure Assessment Methodologies and Technologies

      Recent years have seen significant advances in the technologies and methodologies used for exposure assessment. Both the measurement and analysis of exposure data have been substantially innovated and improved. Both statistical approaches and modeling approaches to exposure assessment have continued to advance with the publication of the AIHA's exposure assessment strategies textbook and mathematical modeling textbook (58). The use of statistical methods to demonstrate compliance with regulatory limits or exposure guidelines are increasingly appealing to corporate leadership and industrial hygienists with an interest in demonstrating a scientific basis for safety and health expenditures in the workplace. Similarly, Bayesian Data Analysis has allowed industrial hygienists to demonstrate statistically the intersection of quantitative data with professional judgment or experience with workplace systems or operations (59).

Further, with enhanced computing and data analysis powers, it is now possible to evaluate increasingly large data sets for statistical trends and significance. This has led to advances in what is known as “Big Data”, which involves the organization and analysis of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of data points. Such data analysis capabilities have become important for managing the data output of improved data collection instrumentation that can provide measurements in real time and in large quantities at high speed. Many such sensor technologies can provide multiple readings per minute or even per second. With the many valuable benefits of real time data to help assess exposures and protect workers comes the very real challenge of managing the data output of this instrumentation (https://synergist.aiha.org/201702-aiha-role-in-big-data-and-sensor-tech). That being said, sensor technologies, many of which will be integrated into handheld devices, phones, or other micro‐sized instrumentation, are the future direction of data collection for industrial hygiene.

      And finally, a significant development in the practice of exposure assessment is the development of occupational exposure banding and control banding (CB) methods. The goals of these methods are to standardize the approach to exposure assessment and risk assessment, often in situations where no exposure data or published exposure limits exist for use by industrial hygienists. There is a distinction between these different methods among those that focus on the appropriate selection of controls (CB) compared to classifying exposures (occupational exposure banding). Different approaches have been developed by a number of countries and agencies around the world, including the Control of Substances Hazardous to Heath (COSHH) Essentials program in the United Kingdom (a CB method) and the Occupational Exposure Banding approach from NIOSH in the United States (an occupational exposure banding method).

      In the absence of an established OEL, CB methods can offer assistance to smaller entities in developing control options for workplace hazards, particularly when large air sampling campaigns for multiple chemicals or chemical mixtures are difficult. CB techniques do not replace the need for an on‐site expert when one is needed for the evaluation of high‐hazard or complex exposure scenarios. CB relies on certain aspects of the precautionary principle (i.e. the less information available to evaluate the hazard and risk, the more conservative the control strategy that must be selected and implemented). Early forms of CB were developed in the pharmaceutical industry and at companies like Dow Chemical, where work with large numbers of potentially new or hazardous compounds without OELs has made alternatives to risk management and exposure control necessary (60),(61). The more basic forms of CB often involve four levels of risk management options, including good occupational hygiene practices, which may be supplemented by the use of PPE; engineering controls; containment; and the seeking of specialty advice (62). Risk phrases, or R phrases, which are required on material safety data sheets (MSDSs) or SDSs distributed in the EU (and increasingly common on all MSDSs), along with the hazard classes specified by the GHS for the classification and labeling of chemicals, are often used to establish the hazard bands or categories within CB tools. For the identified controls, CB typically uses effective control СКАЧАТЬ