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AFS NEWS “ My sponsored webinar
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David Weiss Vice President, Sales & Engineering Eck Industries Inc.
AFS Member Voices Industry’s Concerns With OSHA’s Silica Rule at House Hearing
Janis Herschkowitz, Regal Cast, testifi es before the House Committee on Education Workforce Protections Subcommittee.
On April 19, the House Committee on Education
Workforce Protections Subcommittee held a hearing on the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administra- tion’s (OSHA) recently finalized crystalline silica rule and the impact it will have on the nation’s workplaces. AFS member Janis Herschkowitz, who owns a small,
second-generation metalcasting facility, Regal Cast, Lebanon, Pennsylvania, testified on the hearing panel, describing the technological and economic challenges metalcasting facilities will face in complying with OS- HA’s immense new silica rule and highlighting the need for systemic reform of the rulemaking process. “There is not a one-size-fits-all solution that is guar- anteed to work,” Herschkowitz told committee members. “Some foundries may spend millions of dollars retrofit- ting and rebuilding in order to implement the various types of engineering controls—essentially trial and er- ror—while attempting to comply with the new standard. Foundries will have to exhaust all feasible engineering and work practice controls to meet the new reduced lim- its before ever being allowed to use respiratory controls.” Herschkowitz also described how the new rule was based on decades old data and regulators had vastly underesti- mated the cost of the rules to metalcasting plants. OSHA’s fi nal rule, published in March 2015, reduces the
METALCASTINGDESIGN.COM 64 | MODERN CASTING May 2016
workplace exposure limit by half (from 100 micrograms per cubic meter to 50 micrograms per cubic meter over an eight- hour work shift) and contains a host of other requirements. During the formal rulemaking process, AFS presented substantial evidence that OSHA’s proposed permissible exposure limit (PEL) was technologically and economi- cally infeasible for U.S. metalcasting businesses. In addi- tion to the association’s legal challenge filed on April 4, AFS will continue to seek measures to improve the rule with Congress and the next presidential administration. For more information on the silica rule and its impact on metalcasting, visit
www.afsinc.org/silica.
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