Is the industry doing enough to protect equipment operators from potentially harmful dust?
Ask any demolition contractor to name his company’s greatest asset and most will grudgingly admit that it’s their staff and, in particular, its equipment operators, knowing that such a public admission of gratitude will almost certainly prompt pay rise demands.
And yet, at a time when the UK demolition business is buying water cannons to protect pedestrians and the wider environment at a faster rate than the Syrian military, it is seemingly doing very little to offer the same level of protection to its most valuable asset.
What prompted this revelatory insight, I hear you ask? Well, anyone that spent any time walking around this week’s Hillhead 2012 exhibition couldn’t help but bump into a high powered dust suppression system sooner or later. Yes, these may have their limitations with high buildings and in high winds, but in a contained quarry environment, they are nothing short of miraculous in their ability to capture and contain dust particles.
But having been lightly moistened for the third time in a single day by a particularly powerful model on display on the European Attachments stand, I took some time to watch a few of these units in action. Yes, they do emit a fine mist; yes, they do reduce dust emissions by a significant degree over a remarkably wide area; and yes, they are a worthwhile addition to the equipment fleet of any demolition contractor keen to avoid complaints about dusty cars and dirty laundry from its site neighbours.
Yet these machines do not offer anywhere near the same level of reassurance to the operator of the machine that is generally at the very heart of the dust creation process. And to make matters worse, those select few operators that actually recognise the good sense in closing doors and windows and rely upon the machine’s air conditioning to keep them cool are likely to be exposing themselves to potentially harmful dust particles that are too fine to be caught by the machine’s standard filters.
While this is not a peculiarly UK issue it is interesting to note that in other parts of Europe, in-cab filtration is considered less a luxury and more a matter of course. In-cab filtration is used extensively in Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Indeed, Dutch demolition giant Beelen Sloopwerken safeguards all of its operators with these systems as standard.
Of course, such systems come at a cost – manufacturer Trans-Elektro claims a figure of around 50 Euro cents per hour – but if equipment operators really are a demolition company’s greatest asset, surely they are worth a level of investment normally committed to saving next door’s car from a light sprinkling of dust?
