Save Your Workers — Create an Asbestos Management Plan Today

Excess asbestos floating in the air in factories is a serious thing. It is a health hazard to the workers, and it is a great threat to stakeholders and communities as well. Asbestos is a very dangerous material and therefore it needs to be managed properly and safely. Let us go and have a look at this matter today.

In handling the asbestos issues in a factory, one tool comes in very handy — an Asbestos Management Plan (AMP). It is basically a document with a set of measures about where any identified asbestos or asbestos-containing material is present, and how it will be managed.

The plan must begin with good preparations about how to handle asbestos-related material is kept and managed in the given industrial site. One copy of the asbestos management plan should always be kept on the factory floor itself, while other copies need to be distributed around the other PCBU’s as well.

When Do We Need an AMP

Any industrial site or facility that uses or creates asbestos or asbestos-containing material must have an AMP ready at hand, well-visible to general workers, on the factory floor as well as in other sections of the facility. It should be adopted even when asbestos is found only sometimes in the site, since the substance is so dangerous to anyone who stays in the proximity of it for a good amount of time.

Having an asbestos management plan ready at hand will ensure that the facility or site is prepared to deal with the harmful effects of asbestos likely to occur on-site. These effects include the issues happening from respirable asbestos fibers that can be breathed in without knowledge. All factory workers, tenants, clients, or even visitors to the factory will benefit from a good AMP.

The workplace management should revise an AMP every time when the following occurs:

• Asbestos controls get reviewed
• Asbestos is removed, disturbed, sealed, or enclosed
• The plan fails to meet the asbestos safety criteria for the volume that is (or will be) present in the facility
• If a new asbestos area is identified, or a new area opens up
• When an employee requests a review of the plan in relation to any problems happening with asbestos
• Every five years or as mentioned in the legal safely directives

What Does an AMP Include

A good asbestos management plan that covers all the key areas of concern with asbestos management should contain the following criteria:

1. Control Measures — listing out the risk factors and the objects or items causing a health hazard. They can be categorized as necessary.
2. Monitoring and management — How the risky items and objects containing asbestos will be monitored and observed for safety, and then how will they be managed so that they do not pose a threat. For example, the high-risk items may need to be isolated and contained at once.
3. Recording and Documentation — the AMP will clearly outline how to document and file the records of all the asbestos items and materials containing asbestos. It should also record what containment, isolation, and other safety features have been taken on such items and materials.

These areas of asbestos management are absolutely crucial for a safe and healthy rinning of any industrial site or facility that creates or handles asbestos. They should be implemented and the AMP should be in place even before the project begins, not as an afterthought. Ensuring this will help prevent workplace incidents and absolutely minimize asbestos-related health hazards to your workers, saving lives.

So, how can you set up an AMP? Fortunately, there are a lot of free asbestos management plan templates available online — you can just download one and configure it to suit your factory or facility.