Occupational Hygiene

Occupational Hygiene & Safety

BBN is an asbestos and environmental consultancy dedicated to helping clients ensure optimal safety and assurances at all stages of their business. Whether you're a new organisation or an established large business, we help you follow best practices and state rules and regulations for optimal occupational hygiene and safety.

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Our Services

Occupational hygiene services

Occupational hygiene is about knowing what your workers are exposed to and controlling it before it harms anyone. BBN's qualified team covers the full picture:

Workplace exposure monitoring

Task-based personal monitoring of dusts, fumes, vapours and noise, assessed against workplace exposure standards. Learn more →

Respirable crystalline silica

Exposure assessment, control planning and health monitoring support for silica-generating trades. Learn more →

Mould assessment

Moisture-source diagnosis, extent mapping, remediation scoping and independent clearance verification. Learn more →

Asbestos registers & plans

Registers and management plans that keep workplaces compliant with WHS obligations. Learn more →

Asbestos air monitoring

Air monitoring during removal works and clearance inspections so areas are safe to reoccupy. Learn more →

Asbestos testing

Licensed Asbestos Assessors identifying asbestos-containing materials before work starts. Learn more →

Benefits of working with BBN

The best way to ensure you follow the law is to work with an experienced team that can assess your site with industry leading technology and high quality service. BBN excels at providing prompt service, whether you're looking for a phone consultation or a site visit, anywhere in Australia.

We use an industry leading NATA-accredited lab to undertake all our testing to ensure reliability at all times, with reports turned around fast so your project keeps moving.

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Keep your people and your site safe

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FAQs

Have Questions? We’re here to help you.
What does an occupational hygienist actually do?
An occupational hygienist identifies, measures and controls the things in a workplace that can make people sick over time: dusts, fumes, vapours, noise, heat and similar hazards. The job is to measure real exposure against the workplace exposure standards and give you controls that bring it down. Anticipate, recognise, evaluate, control.
When do I need to bring in an occupational hygienist?
Common triggers are a new process, substance or plant item, uncertainty about whether exposure exceeds a standard, a worker complaint or health effect, a regulator visit or improvement notice, or a principal contractor requiring monitoring before you start on site. If you are relying on "it's probably fine" for any airborne or noise hazard, that is the trigger.
What is a workplace exposure standard?
It is the airborne concentration of a substance that a worker can be exposed to over a defined period, usually a shift, without it being considered to cause harm. Standards are set nationally. What matters for your duty is where your workers actually sit against the relevant standard, which only monitoring can establish.
What is the difference between occupational hygiene and safety?
Safety generally deals with immediate hazards that cause injury: falls, machinery, electricity. Occupational hygiene deals with health hazards that harm over time through exposure: dust, noise, chemicals, fumes. The two overlap, but hygiene is about the slow risks that do not announce themselves until the damage is done.
Is exposure monitoring a legal requirement?
Where there is uncertainty about whether exposure exceeds a workplace exposure standard, or where monitoring is needed to show controls are working, yes. Some substances, including respirable crystalline silica and lead, carry explicit monitoring and health surveillance duties.
What happens if monitoring shows exposure is too high?
Controls are applied in order of effectiveness: eliminate or substitute the hazard first, then engineering controls, then administrative controls, with respiratory or hearing protection as the last line rather than the whole answer. Then you remonitor to verify the control actually worked.
Can you assess several hazards in one visit?
Yes, and it is usually more cost effective to. Where a site has dust, noise and chemical exposures, we scope a single programme so one mobilisation covers everything, rather than paying for repeat visits.