2018-01-08
413
4.1 Safety in use of chromium at leather
This threshold level or the non-sensitizing effect level is unfortunately in a range of several ppm of cr(vi). This means, a sensitive person can theoretically be affected by leather, which contains these amounts of cr(vi). So how significant is this risk in reality? What we can state is, leather has been used the main substrate for shoe manufacturing and skin contact leather goods such as watch bands since decades, and scientific investigations have shown, the percentage of the population that is hypersensitive against cr(vi) is low. It appears that there is a mechanism in place so that this risk of contact dermatitis is somehow minimized. One of the reasons could be, as explained earlier concerning the equilibrium and environmental reduction, trivalent cr(iii) is formed prior to contact and penetration of the skin. The remaining amount of cr(vi) will be below an observed effect level. However, this is only a possible and logical theoretical explanation based on scientific observations; it is not yet proven to be scientifically correct.
The fact is, according to several scientific studies the number of people that are hypersensitive to cr(vi) is low. Official numbers refer to 0.4 % of the population, which may react positive to chromium. This is in the same range like cases against many other metals (allergic reactions against gold are 4 times, and against nickel even more than 10 times higher) and a magnitude lower than allergic cases against e.g. Certain food, lactose, grass, etc. Once a person reacts hypersensitive against chromium and it is known, there is an easy way to protect themselves in case some e.g. Shoe upper leather would contain respective amounts of cr(vi); they just have to wear socks in a shoe and avoid a direct contact of leather with their skin.
|
|
|
As a conclusion: measured cases for dermatitis sensitization to leather in today's population is not a concern as often claimed in certain media. Implementation of standard technologies and further r&d results would even lower this risk and need to be pursued
Practical ways to avoid cr(vi) formation in leather
Therefore, to be on the safe side, it is important to produce leather without any detectable amount of cr(vi). This is manageable, a tanner has to follow strictly certain rules and use the right chemicals. These process technology guidelines are not rocket science, actually most of the tanners do practice them already today and they require a certain manufacturing discipline.
Points have been developed to avoid a cr(vi) formation during the process and to create a leather matrix, which has a built-in insurance to avoid the generation of cr(vi) during storage and use:
1. Always use premium chrome tanning salts
2. No use of oxidation agents (i.e. Bleaching) on leather after tanning
3. Finish the wet end processing at (low) ph conditions (3.5 - 4)
4. Carry out a final washing
5. Avoid the use of excess ammonia prior to the dying process
6. Use high performance softening chemicals (no unsaturated lipids or waxes)
7. Avoid the use of chromate pigments (yellow and orange inorganic pigments)
8. Use between 1 and 3% vegetable tannin extract as this provides antioxidant protection
9. Use of synthetic antioxidants where it is not possible to apply vegetable agents *
The level of knowledge about proper storage and handling of particularly hazardous chemicals is very low. Measuring and mixing of chemicals is done manually in the small-scale tanneries. Process control is generally absent.
Access to safety information on hazardous chemicals is limited by prevailing selling and distribution practices by local and international suppliers, the latter only catering directly to large- scale customers. Even in the latter case, material safety data sheets are not automatically provided with the chemicals as is the common practice and requirement in the industrialised countries. At the same time, when provided, information from material safety data sheets is not translated into preventive or protective measures nor adequately explained to the storage and handling personnel.
Machines locally manufactured generally lack basic safety installations such as active and passive safety devices. But these machines are used by most small- and medium-scale tanners because they are inexpensive. Standards of machine safety therefore are particularly low in these segments. Manufacturers supply these machines of old unsafe designs as these are demanded by their customers. Besides the safety risks, these machines do not allow achievement of high quality standards too [45-46].
|
|
|
Improper design and poor maintenance practices result in exposure to high levels of noise. Survey on hearing impairment among tannery workers conducted indicates a significant percentage of workers and supervisors having partial hearing impairment.
Equally, poor quality and unsatisfactory maintenance of electrical installations, inadequate for the corrosive and humid work conditions in tanneries, leave workers at high risk of electric shocks and fatal accidents.
Control of workplace parameters
Apart from high noise levels, missing or inadequate local extraction systems for spraying vapours, mist and dust result in exposure of workers to such hazards beyond established or recommended occupational threshold limit values.
At the same time, little attention is paid to measures which might contribute to improved quality or productivity, for example proper lighting, workplace layout, alternative means of handling material, improved house keeping, etc.
The above conditions are aggravated by the fact that many tanneries have grown in an unsystematic manner in many countries of the south east asia region. At present these leave little room for carrying out improvements to achieve overall better natural ventilation or illumination, without major capital investments.
Personal protection and emergency preparedness
The limited knowledge and awareness about the existing health hazards and safety risks at work result in a corresponding inadequate protection of tannery workers as well as unsatisfactory preparedness for fire or medical emergencies [45-46].
Some findings
Though it is not possible to conclusively relate any particular ailment of a worker to the working conditions of a tannery mainly due to the high turnover of workers, generally the following health hazards or impairments have been reported among some tannery workers of the developing countries of south east asia:
• loss of limb due to machine accidents;
• loss of life due to exposure to h2s particularly in the effluent treatment plants (etps);
• full or partial loss of hearing;
• skin irritation and ailments due to direct contact with chemicals;
• burns due to contact with / spillage of corrosive chemicals on skins of workers;
• respiratory disorder due to inhalation of dust / vapour.
Framework conditions limitation of small tanners
Despite their importance in the context of the country’s economy (e.g. Contribution to country’s export revenue, employment, etc.), many small and medium scale tanneries face problems such as
• non-availability of funds, in terms of fixed and working capital and inadequate access to bank loans;
• non-availability of raw material of proper quantity and quality;
• competition in product markets, demanding higher quality at lower price;
• infrastructure bottlenecks such as power failure or erratic power supply, break-down of transport and communication;
• old plant and equipment, limitation of space for proper lay-out, need for frequent maintenance and repair (however with limited or poor outside facilities available);
• limited access to labour market, as work in tanneries is often seasonal and has an unflattering image and lower social standing.
Besides these, leather manufacture in many cases is considered a craft with long tradition, which is handed down from generation to generation in the same family. Production methods and process flow have virtually not changed for decades, except for introduction of some new chemicals or improvements in machines and mechanical equipment used. Tanning communities are often found to be insular.
The day-to-day problems, as pointed out above, with which the management of small scale tanneries has to cope and the long traditions inherent in the tanning sector pose particular challenges to persons who have the responsibility of improving occupational safety and health standards and practices at work in this sector in these countries [45-46].
Attitudinal and other factors
A combination of factors, many of these unhelpful, exist in these countries which inhibit speedy adoption of improved practices. Some important factors, as identified survey, include:
• many small and medium-scale tanners usually do not perceive occupational safety and health at work as a real issue;
• in view of its insularity, the tanning community is less likely to look for outside help;
• the tanners may be even hostile or lukewarm in their response to training and outside assistance; with little trust in academic lectures and lessons;
• the tanners main concern is to maintain business or solve routine problems, with limited time and resources for activities which are not directly linked with production, marketing and short-term profit;
• they may have a low awareness and limited knowledge of ways for improving occupational safety and health standards at work;
• being often small companies, the owner-tanner may have an autocratic management style, in which motivating or training worker is considered a waste, in view of high labour turnover (due to the seasonality of work and unsatisfactory image of the sector).
Positive approach
The framework conditions and attitudinal factors indeed pose serious challenges. At the same time, there are some positive features too. Success can be achieved faster in introduction of improved practices if special efforts are made to identify such positive factors and harness these to the advantage of the industry. Some of the factors observed in the reference countries include:
• overall productivity and particularly labour productivity are generally low and are responsive to simple and low-cost improvements;
• in view of the prevalent competition and global trade requirements tanners may be interested to adopt measures which give immediate and visible results and increase their short-term profits at the same time;
• small-scale tanners are accustomed to accepting information through informal approaches and particularly from persons within the community;
• tanners seem to be more responsive when within their own community and in vicinity of their accustomed work environment;
• tanners in general have been found in the region to be usually very practical and action oriented people.
• tanners are likely to have more respect for advice from other independent tanners than external specialists and experts or formal programmes.
Occupational safety and health
Keeping the framework conditions in mind, it was realised by unido that any endeavour which aims at overcoming the lack of awareness and lack of knowledge would have to be built around the following principles:
|
|
|
• build on local practices and problems: change is best stimulated by starting from the real problems and conditions in the work areas instead of the priorities of outsiders. Approaches have to be flexible and informal. Exchange of experience among tanners can be used to create enthusiasm for positive attitude to change.
• focus on local achievements: emphasize simple improvement measures which are already in use locally, and highlight, when they were particularly designed and implemented on tanners’ own initiative.
• link between occupational safety and health conditions with other management goals: explain and highlight the link between improved occupational safety and health standards and practices and improved profit situation, cost savings, etc. Again using examples from within the tanning community.
• transfer know-how through show-how: promote and explain improvement measures by actual demonstration on-site. Ideally, let the person on-site (e.g. Another tanner) explain the improvement measure.
• include practical exercises: learning by doing - particularly action or measures which directly contribute to solving existing problems.
• sensitizing the tanners to global trade requirements. This is particularly relevant in situations where tanners are export-oriented or export dependent.
Approach has been to look at enhancing productivity, environmental performance as well as safety and health standards at work in the tanneries of the participating countries simultaneously. With particular reference to the aspect of promoting occupational safety and health at work, the approach is based on a network of demonstration sites in working tanneries as well as effluent treatment plants and supporting institutions including r&d and training institutes [45-46].
After assessing the prevailing safety and health standards at work in selected tanneries, using a standardised audit checklist developed by experts working under the regional programme, unido jointly with its national counterparts and the tanners implemented improvement measures on-site in these tanneries and effluent treatment plants. At the same time, the team of unido experts, tanners and representatives from national specialised agencies prepared a comprehensive training programme together with training tools. At present, training workshops are being organised in the different tannery clusters of the participating countries. These training workshops particularly aim at the managers and supervisors of tanneries as key agents of change of work conditions and practices [45-46].
Particularly, in india and indonesia, a supporting infrastructure concerning occupational safety and health related services has been established through agreements between tanner’s associations, r&d institutions and unido. Under these agreements, the tanners can access professional services pertaining to work place monitoring and auditing, industrial hygiene measurement and expert guidance on on-site improvement measures.
Achievements after 2 years
• 15 osh demonstration sites have been established in tanneries in china, india, indonesia and nepal.
• 1100 tanners have been trained on occupational safety and health requirements in tanneries.
• a tannery specific osh manual has been prepared which is available in english, bahasa- indonesia and chinese.
• osh related service centres have been established in two countries.
Occupational safety and health
The activities initiated by unido in the field of occupational safety and health standards at work in the tanning industry in south east asia can be seen only as a beginning.
|
|
|
Economic damage
Pollution of the environment adversely affects the quality of the natural environment, but also undermines the quality of human capital, accelerates the wear and tear of elements of constant capital, and restrains the accumulation of aggregate capital. In this regard, there was a need to assess the environmental and economic damage to the natural environment.
Under economic damage, in our opinion, it is necessary to understand the actual losses incurred by the enterprise and the population in terms of environmental pollution.
Economic damage is a complex value and is expressed by the sum of the main local losses from the deterioration of public health, economic activity, industry,
Environmental factors that shape economic damage are divided into three main groups: the factors of influence, perception and state.
Factors of influence are the level and nature of anthropogenic impacts.
Perception factors are characterized by the main objects that fall into the zone of influence and perceive negative impacts (population, communal services, urban development, agricultural and forest land, fixed assets of industry, transport, communications, natural ecosystems, etc.).
State factors directly determine the amount of loss per unit recipient, which uses valuation estimates to translate changes in society and nature.
In addition, environmental factors that have a negative impact on economic indicators can be classified according to the conditions of formation and accounting features.
Depending on the formation conditions, there are internal factors and external factors. Internal factors are determined by the technical level of the specific production, the nature of the technological processes, the quality of the processed raw materials and energy carriers in the enterprises, etc. External factors are determined by natural, meteorological, topographic, socio-economic, hygienic and other regional characteristics.
With a statistical assessment of the magnitude of environmental and economic damage, methods for quantifying economic damage can be used, which is subdivided into methods of direct calculation, analytical and empirical.
The peculiarity of the direct counting method is that the amount of economic damage is determined directly for a particular research object by direct calculation of the various components of losses expressed in value form. This approach is based on a comparison of indicators of the state of recipients in the contaminated area with the corresponding indicators of clean territory.
The approach based on the study of analytical dependencies is based on obtaining mathematical dependencies (multifactor analysis) between the indicators of the state of the economic system and the quality of the environment.
By empirical method is understood the dependence of damage on the level of impacts obtained by the first two methods for private objects, is generalized and used for similar situations for a specific surveyed enterprise. Consequently, the empirical assessment of economic damage assumes the use of a system of normative indicators fixing the dependence of the negative consequences of a violation on the main factors, which in practice are usually used indicators of specific economic loss per unit number of recipients at a fixed level of pollution, which are calculated on the basis of direct account methods.
The first two methods require the collection and processing of a huge amount of information and in practice, as a rule, are not used, but serve as only a tool for creating an information base when developing an empirical methodology.
Also, under environmental damage to the natural environment, additional costs associated with the need to eliminate pollution of the natural environment and stop its destruction should be understood. This approach is generally consistent with the interpretation of economic damage in the context of environmental costs.
The main components of environmental pollution costs include:
1) costs of pollution control;
2) additional costs for the elimination or reduction of sanitary, social and other consequences of environmental pollution;
3) the cost of non-production due to a decline in labor productivity.
The first component is accounted for as part of production costs, the latter are used to determine damage and to calculate payments for environmental pollution.
To compensate for environmental pollution costs, there are three sources: budgetary allocations, producer of material goods and their consumer (population). Hence, three forms of cost recovery are distinguished: budget, enterprise profits and prices.
Economic damage from pollution of the natural environment is a complex amount equal to the amount of damage to recipients. In most cases, the main types of recipients include the population, objects of housing and communal services and households, agricultural orestry resources and fixed assets of industry. The process of anthropogenic impact on the environment is a process in which there are four main "participants": pollutants, polluted territories with their geographic, climatic, meteorological and other specifics, recipients located in these territories. Under the economic damage (u) from pollution of the environment is understood as the sum of the reduced costs for recipients aimed at: preventing harmful effects spread (protection from exposure, its reduction); methods for assessing damage can be divided into two large groups: - direct recipient methods - methods for aggregate damage assessment. The official methodological basis for an integrated assessment of damage is the temporary
typical methodology for determining the economic efficiency of implementing environmental measures and assessing economic damage caused to the national economy by environmental pollution. Recipient method allows to identify the list of contaminated objects, their structure and components of corresponding losses. Types of recipient damage on the basis of homogeneity of objects and elements subject to environmental load are classified into basic and complex. Complex recipient types of damage consist of a certain set of basic types of damage. An example of a basic damage is the damage from deteriorating the health of the population, an example of comprehensive damage is damage in the housing and communal services. In our opinion, the first group is characterized by a rather high accuracy of estimation, but a great deal of labor, the second is characterized by low labor costs, but low accuracy. Damage to the population is the deterioration of his health as a result of pollution of the components of the natural environment. Increase in the level of the incidence of the population causes in the economy additional costs associated with medical services for the population, a decrease in the production of national income due to reduced productivity and temporary disability, payment of temporary disability benefits, etc. Then in this case, you can determine the indicators of social -economic effect of environmental protection measures: the effect of preventing losses of net production due to the morbidity from pollution with food:
Эп = бхпг (р1 — р2), (1)
where b - the number of employees, abstract from the production due to illness or caring for the sick; pg - net production per one person-day; p1, p2 - respectively, the number of work days per employee before and after the implementation of environmental protection measures. The effect of reducing payments from the social insurance fund:
(2) where d is the number of employees receiving sickness benefit due to environmental pollution; вп - the average size of the grant; р1, р2 - the number of work days per employee before and after environmental protection measures. Another direction of the assessment of environmental and economic damage, in our opinion, is the integration of statistical accounting of financial and economic performance indicators of enterprises and environmental monitoring indicators in conjunction with sources of negative anthropogenic impact, which will provide the most complete assessment of the effectiveness of their activities. To increase the validity of the decisions taken, use a single integral criterion of environmental and economic efficiency (fig.). The most logical way to obtain such a criterion is to include in the cost structure for each variant of the decision a valuation of the negative external effect, and in the revenue structure, the valuation of a favorable environmental impact or to reduce the negative impact. The economic justification of the corresponding costs for environmental measures in the market is manifested in the product quality category, which should be expanded by the notion of ecological quality. It implies how safe it is from an environmental point of view to manufacture this product. Requirements for environmental quality become mandatory in the consumer markets of many countries, as well as systems for the certification of the environmental quality of production production. The proposed integral criteria for investment effect is the evaluation of investment projects in accordance with generally accepted criteria. The environmental effect of the decision can be assessed as the difference between the positive effect, which is expressed in the reduction of the costs of the entire ecological and economic system of the region as a whole as a result of the elimination of negative environmental impact, and the negative environmental effect, which is expressed in increasing the costs of the entire environmental and economic system as a whole to eliminate the negative impact on the environment. The infrastructural effect is manifested in a decrease in the cost of production in related industries throughout the entire economic systemregion as a whole, due to transportation savings, due to lower prices as a result of increased competition, through the use of new technologies, etc. The social effect is manifested as the difference between the cost-based quality of life assessment, including all the quality components, and the population's costs to achieve them. In our opinion, this approach for assessing the environmental and economic effect allows taking into account long-term environmental consequences in the evaluation of economic decisions at any level of planning. Accounting for the environmental component in the assessment of investment decisions allows you to enter the category of environmental quality of the project, which will be taken into account by investors as a success or risk factor for the proposed investment project. In the methodological aspect, the existing scheme for calculating the economic damage from the placement of solid waste in the natural environment enterprises. The most integrated assessment of economic damage from pollution of the components of the environment is presented in the "temporary guidance on the calculation of environmental damage from excessive and unauthorized placement of solid waste (products).
" calculation of damage from pollution of the components of the natural environment is determined by the formula:
Where yt is the total damage from pollution of the components of the environment as a result of placement in the accumulator of an excess volume of the company's waste in the year "t", tenge; yb - damage from water pollution, in tenge; yn - damage from pollution of soils, tenge; ya - damage from pollution of atmospheric air, tenge; yb - specific economic damage caused to water resources; yn - specific economic damage caused to soils; ya - specific economic damage caused to atmospheric air; мсверх - estimated excess volume of the company's waste, stored in the storage, t; kvt is a constant that characterizes the significance of the water management sector in which the reservoir in question is located; kat is a constant characterizing the relative danger of air pollution over different types of territories; кс - an indicator of the socio-economic importance of the territory of the location of the waste accumulator of an enterprise of a particular enterprise; a kb-indicator that takes into account the category of agricultural land of the territory adjacent to the waste storage of a particular enterprise.
A more complex method for estimating the economic damage caused to production as a result of solid waste is defined as an integral value on the basis of the formula where y is the annual damage estimate (tenge / year); k - compensation losses for the seized land resource (tenge); s is the area occupied by the waste; r - cost of works on reclamation (tenge / ha), з - costs for transportation, preparation, storage and storage of waste (tenge / year); uatm - damage from atmospheric pollution (tenge / year); gathering - damage from pollution of water bodies (tenge / year); (1 + en) - t is the coefficient of reduction; enp - the standard for reducing the time costs = 0, 08; t is the year of remediation works (0≤t ≤35). But this approach requires a more advanced information base based on expert assessments and giving a full assessment of the properties of waste. When assessing the environmental and economic damage, many, often interrelated and interdependent factors must be taken into account, which significantly complicates the practical use of the relevant statistical methods and models.
