Like any high-traffic business, industrial workplaces can be breeding grounds for disease-causing germs and bacteria, health hazards, and toxic chemicals. Manufacturing and industrial facilities must stay clean and sanitized in order to run properly.

Industrial hygiene consultants play an integral role in maintaining these facilities and keeping them functioning. This is especially true during outbreaks and pandemics like COVID-19. Industrial hygienists foster safe workplaces that stay in compliance with regulations, laws, and company standards. Here is why your business may need to hire one.

What Industrial Hygiene Consultants Do

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) describes industrial hygiene as the science behind improving workplace conditions. Their job is to “anticipate, recognize, evaluate, and recommend controls” for hazards that can affect the health of everyone within a workplace.

While most workplaces are committed to safe work environments and practices, it is the job of an industrial hygienist to even anticipate potential harms that may arise — whether from chemical processes, spreading pathogens, bacteria, noise, or excess heat. These positions go above and beyond someone already on the payroll.

Once a company has an industrial hygiene consultant, this person or group can help the business with the following tasks:

• Complete an Assessment: Industrial hygiene consultants can look over entire facilities to spot chemical, biological, physical, and other hazards. This is important knowledge to have in order to keep workers safe and healthy.
• Control Strategies: After pinpointing issues, potential and actual safety hazards, and health risks, the consultant can help develop a plan to mitigate or eliminate these risks completely.
• Reports: Consultants can give managers, employees, and/or building staff a detailed report of where health gaps may be hiding. These reports can be used to instigate change and pull from budgets to incorporate better safety measures.

These are especially important processes as the world is more aware now than ever before of the spread of diseases, pathogens, and harmful bacteria. Industrial cleaning services are a must to protect employees.

Why Industrial Hygiene Consultants are Important

Industrial hygienists actually have a storied history of making workplaces safe. According to OSHA, this science has been in motion since as early as the fourth century BC. Hippocrates, a Greek physician, discovered the toxic nature of lead within the mining industry, kicking off the need for health regulations within the workplace. Later, in the first century AD, a roman scholar discovered the health risks and side effects of zinc and sulfur exposure. As time went on and people discovered more harms, the industrial hygiene consultant industry became more and more of a necessity. Today, these positions essentially answer to OSHA, ensuring safe environmental factors and practices are followed. In fact, nearly all employers are required to implement at least some elements of industrial hygiene within their workplaces due to OSHA regulations.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows occupational health and safety specialists and technicians typically have bachelor’s degrees in occupational health and safety or a related scientific or technical field. Between 2021 and 2031, the BLS projects the need for industrial hygienists to grow by 5%, showing more businesses are needing this type of service.

Enviro-Master Services provides industrial businesses, including manufacturing facilities, with cleaning services to stay on top of dirt, dust, and grime. Thus allowing your business to run properly and safely by mitigating health risks and keeping machines running in tip-top shape. We use our latest innovations to target direct threats to the well-being of your team members. Our commercial cleaning products, expertly trained health and safety technicians, and incomparable services target harmful bacteria. We offer a wide range of solutions and products for nearly any business sector.

Submit a contact form to get a free quote and learn more about how we can keep your business more than clean, but sanitary.