How Air Sampling Protects Workers from Invisible Workplace Hazards

Breathing is such a basic requirement for life that your body usually handles it involuntarily, inhaling about 20,000 times every day.

But while vital, breathing isn’t risk-free. Inhaling low-quality or polluted air—whether you’re outdoors or indoors, at home or on the job—can weaken your body, leading to long-term illness and in the most severe cases, death.

While hazards vary by location, some have been linked to specific settings and industries. Manufacturing and metalworking operations, for instance, can produce airborne contaminants including dusts, welding fumes, gases, solvent vapors and mists that may cause both immediate and cumulative harm to workers’ health.

To protect employees, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has set a wide array of rules that require steps from ventilating workplaces to using personal protective equipment and collecting and testing air samples to ensure known toxins don’t exceed safe levels.

“Some specific diseases have been linked to specific air contaminants or indoor environments, like asthma with damp indoor environments,” the agency explains. Exposures to other hazards, such as asbestos and radon, “do not cause immediate symptoms but can lead to cancer after many years.”

Permissible Exposure Levels

Symptoms of exposure to poor indoor air quality vary depending on the type of contaminant, OSHA notes. Many can easily be mistaken for symptoms of illnesses such as allergies, colds and flu.

A clue in some cases is that “people feel ill while inside the building and the symptoms go away shortly after leaving the building, or when away from the building for a period of time,” OSHA says.

Although the agency lacks an overall air quality standard, it can penalize businesses under the general duty clause of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act—which requires businesses to provide hazard-free workplaces—as well as under more granular rules.

Read More: Silica Exposure Hazards: How to Protect Your Workers

OSHA Standard 1910.1000 details permissible exposure limits for scores of substances from aluminum dust to carbon dioxide, chlorine and phosphorous, using eight-hour time-weighted averages, which it defines as an employee’s average exposure during any eight-hour shift of a 40-hour workweek. Exposure caps are detailed in the regulation’s tables Z-1, Z-2 and Z-3.

For hazards whose exposure limits aren’t defined in those tables, air monitoring isn’t explicitly required under OSHA regulations, though the agency has long maintained that it’s the most accurate way to identify and measure contaminants.