October 2021 

E-Limit: BC Exposure Limits at Your Fingertips

The WorkSafeBC Exposure Limit Review Committee (ELRC) has been spearheading a project to enhance user access to the BC Exposure Limits.

An Exposure Limit (EL) is the maximum concentration of a chemical substance to which workers can be exposed over a working lifetime without adverse health effects. Each year, the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) publishes a list of substances for which they have set new or revised Threshold Limit Values (TLVs). TLVs are airborne concentrations of chemical substances which represent conditions that nearly all workers may be repeatedly exposed to over a working lifetime, without adverse health effects. The ACGIH TLVs are the foundation for establishing BC ELs.

The Occupational Health and Safety Regulation (OHSR) provides that except as otherwise determined by WorkSafeBC, employers must ensure no worker is exposed to a substance that exceeds the limits prescribed by the ACGIH. The Policy, Regulation and Research Division (PRRD) works with the ELRC to determine which TLVs should be adopted as BC ELs and added to or retained in the Table of Exposure Limits for Excluded Substances in the Prevention Manual.

Ensuring BC ELs are easy to access is essential to keeping workers safe from potential harmful exposures in the workplace. Stakeholders have provided feedback that information about BC ELs is difficult to find and understand. In response, the PRRD and ELRC put together a team to address this issue as part of InnoFest, an internal WorkSafeBC competition to harness technology to develop solutions for issues that WorkSafeBC and our stakeholders face.

The team is about to launch a new digital tool called “E-Limit.” It is designed to look and feel like an app on your mobile device and computer, and provides information about BC ELs in a searchable and easy-to-read format. Unlike the existing WorkSafeBC OHSR mobile app and WorkSafeBC website, this single searchable tool will consolidate information from the following data sources:

• OHSR;
• Prevention Manual policy items;
• Occupational Health and Safety Guidelines;
• ACGIH; and
• International Agency for Research on Cancer.

The full launch of E-Limit is taking place in the fall of 2021.