Assessment of environmental factors in industry

Abstract

With the recent thrust in environmentally conscious manufacturing, there is a need for evaluating the environmental impact of waste streams at the process level. These waste streams occur in different states, have different transport mechanisms and different impacts on the health and safety of operators. This paper presents a hazard scoring system that evaluates the potential hazard to workers exposed to the waste streams in machining processes. The analysis is restricted to a control volume around the process and does not consider far-field ecological effects. The system is based on a number of factors. It incorporates uncertainty in the impact scoring.