Understanding the OSHA Silica Standard [video]
Engineering Manager Matt Diestler discusses OSHA’s silica rule and what you can do to comply.
Transcript
What is Respirable Crystalline Silica?
Respirable crystalline silica can best be defined by looking at each word individually. So let’s just start with respirable. Respirable is the portion of dust that makes it past the unciliated portions of the lungs so our body can’t expel it. That has a median aerodynamic diameter of four microns. To put that in perspective, a human hair has a diameter of roughly 50 to 70 microns—so it’s a fraction of the width of a human hair.
Silica has a lot of different forms. It has a lot of different chemical structures and makeups, but the ones that we’re concerned about with crystal and silica are crystal-like quartz. Stuff like that not the anamorphous types of silica.
The New OSHA Silica Standard
There’s a new OSHA rule in regards to respirable crystal and silica. This affects anyone that handles, cuts, deals with anything containing a crystalline silica on the respiratory fraction. The new OSHA rule effect industry in general by a couple different ways but first off it reduces the OSHA PEL, or permissible exposure limit, from 100 micrograms per meter cubed of air down to 50 micrograms per meter cubed of air and introduces an action level—which is 25 micrograms per meter cubed. What this does is basically reduces the amount of respirable silica that’s airborne where the employees are working.
Impacts of the New Silica Standard
A couple ways that will affect our customers is that they’ll need to do sampling for every area, every employee, every shift. This is dependent how frequently you do this based on if you’re above the action level or if you’re above the PEL. To avoid having employees wear respirators, especially all employees, employers are going to have to get their respiratory silica down to a level that’s below the PEL for sure and below the action level and and to do that the best way to do it is through engineering controls like ventilation.
Additionally compressed air cleaning, dry sweeping, or dry brushing will not be allowed under the new OSHA reg unless other means of cleaning are not feasible. If you are doing dry brushing or compressed air cleaning you’re going to have to implement a ventilation system to capture the particulate that’s dispersed with those cleaning methods.
Silica Standard Compliance: How IVI Can Help
IVI can help you and your employees by designing fabricating and installing engineering controls that better capture the silica that’s in the air we can also look at your process and see if there’s ways that we can reduce compressed air usage or dry sweeping and look at other alternative methods for cleaning or processes.
If you and your company are concerned about whether you’re in compliance with this new OSHA regulation, I would recommend the first step is either work with an internal industrial hygienist or hire one from the outside to start doing some of this silica sampling. Once that sampling is completed IVI can come in and and work with you and your EHS program to determine where the silica’s being generated and what we can do to better capture it. One tool that we use to evaluate this is our IVI flow program. We’ll look at the generation point, the particle size, and look at what kind of capture velocities we need to better capture the particulate.