All Licence holders are required to obtain Personal Monitoring (PM) data which is used to confirm the suitability of RPE and also to allow individual exposures for different types of work to be estimated as accurately as possible.

ACAD’s guide to personal monitoring Personal Monitoring published last year explains how a LARC can build on this essential task to compile meaningful PM figures for different activities such as nailed AIB removal, abrasive blasting of residual debris following manual cleaning techniques, AIB ceiling tile removal, AIB fine cleaning, bag runs etc…

However up until now Licence holders have only ever been able to compare their own figures against likely fibre concentrations printed in HSE publications.  The Licensed Contractors Guide for example details good practice values for the careful removal of whole AIB as those generating up to 3 f/ml.

The lack of external reference values within the Asbestos sector has meant the typical licence holder had no way of comparing the exposure of their employees against other contractors (how well are we actually doing?).

To solve this problem ACAD, the not for profit trade association leading the Asbestos sector, has gathered PM data from a variety of licence holders from across the sector and published our initial findings via the link below.

ACAD will continue to gather PM data and republish this report at least twice annually.  The headline from this initial report though is a positive one in that the average fibre concentration for the careful removal of AIB is more than an order of magnitude lower than the old HSE figure, just below the control limit at 0.098 fcm^-3.

The initial report can be downloaded here.

We’d love to hear how your Personal Monitoring compares up to the new industry benchmark figures published by ACAD.

To find out more or to share your anonymous PM data contact ACAD.