Comprehensive Industrial Hygiene Program for a North American Food and Beverage Company
A Fortune 100 Food & Beverage Company with Over 90 Locations
Solution Overview
Client:
Fortune 100 North American Food & Beverage Company
Business Challenge:
- The client needed a credible and efficient industrial hygiene program to consistently measure, store and analyze exposure monitoring data.
Solution:
- Apex Certified Industrial Hygienists conducted exposure assessments every two years in the production and packaging areas.
Results:
- The program identified four agents that required additional controls and implemented mitigation strategies to limit exposure to facility workers.
Challenge
The client needed a credible and efficient industrial hygiene program to consistently measure, store, and analyze exposure monitoring data.
Solution
Our team of Apex Certified Industrial Hygienists (CIH) began the project by obtaining all occupational hazard exposure information for each designated location and risk-ranked each potential exposure as “acceptable,” “unacceptable,” or “uncertain.”
For all “unacceptable” risk-ranked exposures, new controls were implemented immediately. For exposures risk-ranked as “acceptable,” the CIH re-assessed the exposure every two years to determine if changes to production or packaging affected the risk ranking. And for exposures risk-ranked as “uncertain,” the CIH conducted sampling surveys for the risk of exposure. This process was then repeated every two years for each location. All qualitative risk rankings and exposure monitoring results were recorded in an industrial hygiene exposure assessment database.
Results
This approach has resulted in the identification of three chemical agents and one physical agent that require additional controls. Exposure mitigation strategies, including engineering and administrative control options, have been investigated and business plans have been developed. The strategy includes efforts to align industrial hygiene controls with production efficiency initiatives. Locations to test the control solutions have been identified and the results are currently being tested.