The Meaning and Use of Exposure Limits

Health based values and what is technically feasible. Recent discourse on the OELs that are used in practice in the coimtries of the EU, goes to some lengths to be clear that they do not represent safe levels of exposure for all workers, nor is it intended that they should set a limit below which it is unnecessary or undesirable to reduce exposures fiirther. The Scientific Committee on Occupational Exposure Limits (SCOEL) is quite clear about this, stating for example  

The introduction to the ACGIH TLV list explains that TLVs are intended for use in the practice of industrial hygiene, they do not represent fine lines between safe and dangerous concentrations of hazardous chemicals. However, the origiiiators of the list were confident that TLVs would protect the majority of workers firm haxm and they have been finis extensively promulgated as, essentially safe levels 

Quoted from the preamble to the TLV list still appearing in the 1990s (ACGIH 1996 3, in 

Participatory approaches to standard setting. The European approach is also a product of a regulatory strategy for occupational risks in which an orientation 

To paraphrase the words of one of the significant harbingers of this system, Lord Alfred Robens (Robens 1972). 

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