Environment, Energy, Economy

Chapter 3, Environment, Energy, Economy, opens as industrial PR practitioners in the 1950s and 1960s confront a new rival: environmental pollution and its discontents. Prior to the Second World War, industry was the leading source of information on air pollution among other problems of “industrial hygiene.” In the postwar era, with new federal science funding, changing norms of media representation, and rising legal battles for companies, alternative voices emerged around environmental issues. Amid the transformation of the nature of evidence in scientific research and a growing public anxiety over depletion of the commons, public relations counsel sought to balance the scales in their corporate clients’ favor. They would find this balance in the notion of energy as its own scarce resource in need of protection. The chapter reviews the expansion of public relations networks and the adoption of environmentalism as a force to be strategically managed.

Risk Assessment and Deployment for Safety Showers and Eyewash Stations in the Process Plant Industry

Safety showers and eyewash stations are equipment used for primary washing if their operator is exposed to hazardous chemicals. Therefore, safety showers and eyewash stations should be installed to ensure operator safety in process plants with excessive hazardous chemicals. International guidelines related to safety showers and eyewash stations are introduced in ANSI Z358.1, BS EN 15154, and German DIN 12899-3:2009, but only mechanical specifications regarding safety showers and eyewash stations are suggested. As such, there are currently no engineering guidelines, books, or technical journal papers requiring safety showers or eyewash stations and their efficient deployment. Thus, this study conducted risk assessment from an industrial hygiene perspective, suggesting which process equipment requires a safety shower and eyewash, including their economical and efficient deployment for operator safety. In industry, safety showers and eyewash stations are considered part of the process safety field; this study attempted to contribute to the safety improvement of operators by applying risk assessment of the industrial hygiene field. More studies are needed that contribute to operators’ safety by incorporating industrial hygiene fields for other process safety fields, including safety showers and eyewash stations.

Confronting Two Crises: The COVID-19 Pandemic, the Opioid Epidemic, and the Industrial Hygienist

This article was originally written for and published in the January 2021 issue of The Synergist, a monthly publication of the American Industrial Hygiene Association. The article addresses the convergence of the COVID-19 and opioid crises, the impact of the opioid crisis on the workplace and workers, and the role that industrial hygienists can play in developing workplace programs to prevent and respond to opioid misuse. While the article is specifically written for industrial hygienists, the review and recommendations will be useful to others who are developing workplace opioid prevention programs. Note that the data presented in this article were current as of January 2021. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest available data are for the twelve-month period ending October 2020 and include 88,990 total overdose deaths and 91,862 predicted, when reporting is completed. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm (accessed on 15 June 2021).