OSHA SETS SAFE LEVELS OF SECONDHAND SMOKE IN THE WORKPLACE

“There are no safe levels of secondhand smoke in the workplace.”

The next time you hear someone say this, tell the speaker he or she is misinformed, flat out wrong or full of crap, depending on your mood and the occasion.  Tell him or her that there, indeed, are safe levels of secondhand smoke as established by no less an authority than the United States Government.  In fact, it was the United States Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration that set the safe air quality standard for secondhand smoke. 

OSHA  has established safe levels (otherwise known as permissible exposure limits or PELs) of secondhand smoke in the workplace and those safe levels are up to 25,000 times higher than are normally found in bars and restaurants.

Let’s take that last statement apart to be sure we understand its component facts.

What’s is a PEL?  PEL stands for permissible exposure limit.  PELs are OSHA safe acceptable levels of exposure to humans for an eight hour day, 40 hours per week time period.  The PEL for nicotine as established by OSHA is .5 mg.

Why measure nicotine?  Why not measure formaldehyde or benzene which are also found in secondhand smoke?  Nicotine is the only unique trace chemical in secondhand smoke.  If you measured for formaldehyde, for example, the carpet and other interior sources of formaldehyde would corrupt the test result.  Besides, formaldehyde is formed naturally in the atmosphere due to photochemical oxidation.  Benzene? Benzene is given off from burning foods in the kitchen or diesel exhaust outdoors so, again, a false reading would be obtained. 

Therefore, nicotine is the ideal chemical to measure to determine secondhand smoke concentrations in the air. 

Actually, you could measure every airborne chemical in secondhand smoke and compare them to OSHA guidelines for each specific chemical and you would find the results to be the same, if not even more dramatic. 

What studies prove air quality standards in the workplace are within the OSHA PEL for secondhand smoke?   There are  many.  For one, Oak Ridge National Laboratory testing confirms that air quality testing of secondhand smoke in bars and restaurants "...concluded that exposures to respirable suspended particulate matter (RSP), for example, were considerably below limits (safer than) established by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for the workplace....." 

OSHA, itself, says "Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)...It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded."

In fact, our claim that ‘OSHA’s safe level of secondhand smoke is up to 25,000 times higher than is normally found in bars and restaurants’ is based primarily on studies by the American Cancer Society.

What the American Cancer Society has proven in conducting air quality testing of secondhand smoke is that secondhand smoke absolutely does not constitute a health hazard justifying a government mandated smoking ban.

The American Cancer Society measured the air quality for secondhand smoke in several venues.  ACS tested by measuring the "marker" chemical in secondhand smoke -nicotine.  The results ranged from 20 -940 nanograms / cu. M.  (A nanogram is 10 (-9) of a gram or 0.000000001 of a gram which is also 0.000001 of a mg (milligram).   OSHA safe level 0.5 mg divided by ACS result 20 nanograms, which is also 0.000020 of a mg. Thus, 0.5 /0.00002 = 25,000 times safer than OSHA regulations.

http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/pel/standards.html

http://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=STANDARDS&p_id=9992

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2009/12/secondhand-smoke-is-not-workplace.html

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2007/04/bmj-published-air-quality-test-results.html

Provided by International Premium Cigar and Pipe Retailers



Comments

[Greg Rabb]

Pretty amazing information. Hard to wrap my brain around the fact that the OSHA safe level of second hand smoke is 25,000 times higher than found in most bars. This is just part of the reason I joined CRA today to help fight the good fight!