Control Banding

Hello, this is my third class with Doctor Moss. This is his emergency response class. This is also the first blog of the class so bare with me. The first blog topic that doctor Moss assigned us is control banding. Like always, just by hearing about the topic It confuses me. Just by the name when I hear it I think about it being some type of testing. Or a control to base their experiences off of.  Boy was I wrong. Control banding is a qualitative or semi quantitative risk assessment and management approach to promoting occupational health and safety. No wonder this was the first blog topic of the class. This course is one of the basics for my major. Which is occupational health and safety, and a minor in environmental health and safety. Occupational health and safety is a major key to any workplace in the world. Without a safe and controlled place for people to work, productivity will be decreased. Also if a workplace wants the best productivity out of their workers, then the workforce needs to feel safe and protected.  The main purpose for control banding is to minimize the worker’s exposures to chemicals and other factors. It is intended to help smaller businesses by giving them an easy to understand approach to controlling and maintaining hazardous chemicals and materials. Control banding’s main focus started and was first applied to dangerous chemicals, chemical mixtures, a hazardous substances from harming people at work. Basically control banding is to try and prevent the OSHA worker from having to come in and do his job. OSHA for dummies is the easiest way for me to sum it up.  “the greater the potential for harm, the greater the degree of control needed to manage the situation and make the risk ‘acceptable’”.  The way control banding works is, a single control technology or strategy is paired up with a single “band” or range of exposures for a particular class of chemicals. Products are first placed into a “hazard band” factors used to decide which band a product belongs to can be included in the following,

. Toxicicty of the product

. Ease of exposure

. Type of work process being used

. Duration of exposure

. Quantity of product

  It is usually based off of tables that workers can look at on the spot. Control banding is becoming very big and popular in the pharmaceutical industry.  There are some downsides and limitations to control banding.  It still requires professional experience and knowledge and know how to be able to maintain and validate controls and make sure the workplace is running smoothly,  another limitation of control banding is that it is not fully validated yet.  There is also no universally adopted method for control banding. Which means that not everyone around the world has adopted these practices yet, which means it is open to interpretation.  There are also some risks when dealing with control banding.  Control banding is also dangerous because since it is a set of data for people to use and look off of, there could always be error

to learn more about control banding, click on the links below. 
Control Banding 1
Control Banding 2
control banding 3