According to an exclusive Industrial Safety & Hygiene News magazine subscriber survey, the overwhelming majority of safety and industrial hygiene personnel use OSHA’s permissible exposure limits (PELs) to monitor hazardous substances and as part of their overall employee respiratory protection efforts (85 percent). This despite the fact OSHA’s boss Dr. David Michaels is on record saying many of the agency’s PELs are years out of date., and OSHA has recently launched a long-term initiative to figure out ways to legally update the PELs.
About one-third (35 percent) of the survey respondents use ACGIH® Threshold Limit Values (TLVs), which are voluntary and updated regularly, and about one-quarter (24 percent) use their own internal company exposure limits – almost always limits more stringent than OSHA’s.
