- Health and safety of workers - Exposure to heavy metals like lead, chrome and cadmium has been proven to cause a variety of cancers and other serious health issues. Your employees are your most valuable asset. Asking employees to work around contaminated materials puts them at risk of serious illness. As a protective measure, OSHA requires that anyone working with materials containing inappropriate levels of heavy metals wear at least an OSHA N95 respirator. In addition, asking your employees to work with contaminated materials can affect your company's recruiting efforts.
- Increased insurance - Workman's Compensation, General Health, Product and Property insurance rates typically increase significantly once heavy metal exposure has been identified.
- OSHA & EPA - Plants working with contaminated materials have a much greater likelihood of being subject to OSHA review than those that do not. OSHA activity includes, but is not limited to, numerous inspections and a heightened level of scrutiny. If the EPA gets involved, significant fines are possible and operations can be suspended.
- Increased cost of doing business - To protect your workers, your business could be required to follow certain OSHA mandated exposure constraints, including special protective and monitoring equipment and managed exposure hours. Furthermore, businesses often find that it requires additional overhead when working with contaminated materials. It takes manpower to manage compliance paperwork, procedures, audits, education and certifications.
- Increased cost of waste capture and disposal - Because contaminated materials will have to be captured and disposed of as hazardous material, the type of equipment used and the means of disposal become much more costly. Disposal fees can be 10 times the cost of simply disposing of dust in a dumpster.
- Permitting - A facility that is known to use tainted materials costs more to permit, and may even require special permitting.
- Moving or selling your business - The presence of heavy metals at your business location will certainly raise flags for anyone who is interested in buying your business or property. Holding companies typically avoid potential acquisitions with these types of issues due to possible legal exposure.
These are all very tangible issues that are relatively easy to quantify, but you should not ignore other, less apparent issues that can have a huge impact on your business. For instance, working with materials containing unsafe levels of heavy metals can exclude you from participating in some government business and "green" contracts. There is also the myriad of issues associated with your company's reputation in your industry and your community. Lastly, but certainly not least, using materials containing unsafe levels of heavy metals in your products and solutions passes these risks and responsibilities on to your customers. Statements like, "Our solutions use materials that contain unsafe levels of heavy metals," are not normally seen on a features and benefits list, are they?
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