Personal Protective Equipment Foibles and Management

Do you recall the TV game show The Weakest Link?? No matter how good or bad all of the players in the game were there was always one that provided the least value to the team.? At the end of the show the judge would say “You ARE…. the weakest link!” and off the contestant had to go.? In the world of exposure control Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is the weakest link.? As much as we may like to get rid of the last-ditch barrier between employee and a hazard, we probably never will.

In the worst workplaces PPE is the first, sometimes only, option for the employer or lazy or inexperienced Safety Manager.? In the best workplaces PPE is a last resort and a reminder to keep looking into better exposure controls.? I’m not saying PPE doesn’t have its place, especially where the hazard has not been quantified, or is not in control, such as spill response, or before sampling has been conducted when the exposure could exceed occupational exposure limits.

It’s just that so much can go wrong with PPE and before I go into some examples, I just want to air a personal peeve: Safety Vests are administrative controls, NOT Personal Protective Equipment!? If you put on a hard hat and a hammer falls on your head you may escape or reduce an injury.? If you put on a Safety Vest for working in the road or parking lot and a car hits you it will not PROTECT you.? They are basically just signs that say “Hey, can’t ya see I’m workin’ here???”

Now that we have that out of the way here are some of the hazards created by Personal Protective Equipment.

Gloves are the problematic

When I was a molecular biology Research Assistant/Chemical Hygiene Officer in the ‘90’s you needed to use radioactive isotopes and chemicals that would intercalate (take your left hand and slightly separate the fingers, that’s the DNA or RNA, and take your right hand and fit your fingers into the gap, that’s intercalate) with the DNA or RNA so that you could see pieces of the strands in an electrophoresis agar.? Naturally, anything that would do that is carcinogenic.? I also worked with radioisotopes and x-ray films, ah the good ol’ days.? The safe work practice was to double glove so, if the glove became contaminated you could take it off and take care of things so you could replace both gloves without contaminating all or your equipment.

Have you ever seen a person with large hands strain to get their gloves on and they end up so tight that parts of the glove are much less blue than the less stretched bits?? The thickness of the glove is part of its protection factor, you have the material, nitrile, and a thickness, 5mil, that has been shown to be a barrier to the specific chemical hazard. ?When you reduce the thickness the time until the chemical can get through the material is greatly reduced.? To me, this is especially important for chemicals that are sensitizers and/or absorb through the skin to get to the target organ.

If your Safety Data Sheet gives you a glove material AND a thickness, you’ve used up your Lotto luck for a month.? Although, they do seem to be getting less rare.? If they just say “Wear appropriate protective gloves to prevent skin exposure.” ?Don’t bother calling the chemical manufacturer, call your glove manufacturer and ask them for their recommendation and tell them all of the chemicals in the product.? Most manufacturers provide glove charts but they are only for single chemicals but few businesses work with products with just one chemical in them.

Then you have your glove misers.? They think their doing their employer a favor by not wasting gloves that appear to be clean.? Instead, they carefully take the glove off to be used the next time they need them.? Disposable gloves are not designed to be put back on so their resistance testing results are no longer accurate.

OSHA does math

If you have an employee exposure that requires doubling up on hearing protection, plugs and muffs, you aren’t doubling the protection.? Say, the muffs provide a noise reduction rating (NRR) of 27 and the plugs have an NRR of 13, first OSHA takes 7 off the NRR but the reduction is not 27-7+16-7, it’s 27-7+3.? OSHA only allows a boost of 3dB for the second hearing protector.? The 7 is understandable, it allows for real life use when they arrived at the NRR from experiments in a lab but I’m not sure how they arrived at an increase of 3dB.

Lack of training

When Personal Protective Equipment, PPE, is provided without training and oversight the PPE itself can become the hazard.

An employee requested a respirator because the air contaminants in her work area irritated her nose and throat.? Instead of looking into better ventilation for the trailer she worked in she was given a half mask with the appropriate cartridge. ?When I saw her, she had carefully placed her bandanna around the seal on the respirator, reducing the protection of the device. ?I asked her why she had done this, and she replied that the seal irritated her skin and created a rash.

It turns out that, at the end of the day, she left her respirator on the work bench next to the heated acid bath.? Overnight acid vapor would deposit inside the respirator and on the seal. ?When she donned the protective equipment, the seal would press the acid condensate onto her skin. ?It turned out that the employer provided the protective equipment she requested but had provided a place to store it, training on how to care for it, and oversight to notice the bandanna and ask questions as required by 1910.134(c)(2)(i) and (ii).

(i) An employer may provide respirators at the request of employees or permit employees to use their own respirators…?

(ii)In addition, the employer must establish and implement those elements of a written respiratory protection program necessary to ensure that …… the respirator is cleaned, stored, and maintained so that its use does not present a health hazard to the user.

Lack of storage

When employees are not provided with a convenient place to store their PPE they will come up with their own solutions.? For example, when inspecting a high school, I like to get into all the nooks and crannies. ?I could smell the chlorine in the hot, humid, swimming pool mechanical room. ?This room is in a sort of sub-basement and is somewhat difficult to reach. ?The chlorine in the vapor settled in and on surfaces, as usual for such environments, you could see evidence of corrosion on all the metal surfaces. ?I asked to see the pool maintenance employee’s hands and forearms. ?As expected, he had a mild case of dermatitis.

I asked him how long this had been going on and he said ‘a few years now’ his doctor could not figure it out. He confirmed that it did get better when he was on vacation. ?Then I pointed out the heavy duty re-useable gloves lying nearby on top of a chemical container. ?The employee stated that is where he usually left them.

I explained to the employee he had been giving himself the uncomfortable rash. ?As the gloves sat there between uses the inside and outside would be exposed to corrosive vapors. ?When he put the gloves on, he trapped the corrosive chemical against his skin causing irritation resulting in the rash.? The exposure was infrequent enough that the employee had not made the connection.

The solution was provision of a large zip lock bag (engineering control) into which the employee would store the gloves after they had been rinsed of chemicals and dried with paper towels (training.) ?The bags where the color of the zip changes when sealed are best.

I’ll leave you with a conundrum.? I responded to a complaint in a lab regarding an exposure that had resulted in a facial lesion.? The chemical that highly likely the cause of the lesion was powder light and small amounts had to be measured out in small amounts a couple of times a day for a certain process.? When I walked into the lab I noticed the walls looked wrong.? The lab tech saw me looking and said that it was the powdery chemical that floated during the weighing process.

The lab had a laminar, air flow outward, hood, and a regular, air flow inward, hood.? They had tried to use the regular hood by placing the scale inside the hood but much of the powder was drawn into the hood during the transfer of the chemical from a spoon to the weigh paper inside the scale.

Leaving aside the contamination of the walls of the lab, what would you recommend to make the weighing out of the chemical safer?

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