RR374 - Evaluating the Effectiveness of Legislation, Technology and Working Methods for Reducing Occupational Exposure in the Foundry Industry
The project arose from the Health and Safety Executive's (HSE) Competition of Ideas Initiative and was designed to exploit the wealth of historical dust, fume, and gas occupational exposure monitoring data available in Castings Technology International's (Cti's) archives. The project enabled the extraction of over 50,000 data points from hard copy archived reports and transfer to an electronic analysable database, and sought to provide an insight into the effects of legislation, sector guidance, technology and working methods on the reduction of occupational exposure in the UK foundry industry.
The results demonstrated that the Health and Safety at Work, etc, Act (HASAWA) and Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations (COSHH) together with Cti and its predecessors' proactive approach had profound beneficial effects on exposure. Examination of the database also explored other influences on exposure and relationships between various subsets. It also provided exposure statistics to inform exposure limit setting and raised issues of interest to the occupational hygiene community.
This report and the work it describes were funded by the Health and Safety Executive. Its contents, including any opinions and/or conclusions expressed, are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect HSE policy.
This report makes reference to work carried out by Dr John Thompson that was also funded by HSE. That work is published as Research Report 373 (2005) Development of Statistical Approaches to the Handling and Analysing of Large Occupational Data Sets.
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