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Don't forget that on pretty much every site the standard way of removing the dust generated from the work is to hand a broom to the least intelligent person on site and tell them to get on with it. There is no recognition that this just pumps a massive amount of the settled dust back into the air starting the whole process again. When I was working big sites there was talk of HSE making brooms illegal which brought about much hand wringing and cries of "it's 'elf n safety gone mad!". The proposed solution was to send labourers around the site with these strapped to their backs:
But it seemed to quietly die a death. Largely because there were other genuine counter arguements about using them. The one that sticks in my mind was based around manual handling as the unit would progressively get heavier throughout the shift.
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Bobbo
Nef
Oh I’d definitely test. I guess part of my consideration is that people show concern for the tradesperson and their exposure to asbestos (which is a good thing to be concerned about) but they also ignore the vast dust exposure that tradesperson will experience. In the case of a plasterer, they’ll be working on dusty building sites or houses almost permanently, where the quantities of dangerous airborne particulates will be massive, and the culture for self preservation with regards to dust masks etc isn’t quite up to scratch.
It’s a bit of a sore point for me basically. As a tradesperson I spend all my time working in places that are savagely bad for my health. I try my best to mitigate these risks, but a lot of the time it feels like every tradesperson is basically exchanging health tokens for money. These places are dangerous and inherently bad for your life expectancy. So while the considerations for asbestos are well meaning, I find it rubs me up the wrong way as it is given such reverence and respect, but the huge amounts of day to day dust exposure aren’t (and I’d wager that a lifetime of working in dusty places will be doing most of the legwork when it comes to killing you with some form of lung disease).