Enjoying the Advantages of PAPRs
Versatile but expensive, these units provide full-face protection and comfortable, cool air to their wearers.
PAPR. No, it has nothing to do with the clapper (Clap On, Clap Off), but it does have something to do with helping some of your employees breathe easier. A PAPR (pronounced PAP-er), or Powered Air Purifying Respirator, is a respirator of convenience for those employees who may be problematic into fitting in a regular respirator facepiece or for those jobs where you need cool air or where you need to have a high assigned protection factor (APF; more on that later).
OSHA requires that when an employee notifies his/her employer that the fit of a respirator is unacceptable, the employee needs to be able to select a different facepiece.1 What OSHA doesn’t say is, what do you do when employees do not pass the fit test? They have been medically cleared by a physician, yet they continually smell and taste the Bitrex® during qualitative fit testing with a tight-fitting half-face and then full-face respirator, or you’ve used a quantitative unit and the protection factor is very low.
Case Study
Such was the case with one employee whom I knew. We’ll call him Lenny in this article. Lenny was a quality control technician for the incoming raw materials at a pharmaceutical company. When new raw materials were received, it was Lenny’s job to sample them and send the samples to the QC lab for analysis.
Consider the high blood pressure pill you take. It may be a 5 milligram pill, which means that in a pill that might weigh 1,000 milligrams (1 gram), there are 5 milligrams of the active ingredient and 995 milligrams of fillers, binders, colorants, and similar types of non-active ingredients.You take one pill a day, and your blood pressure stays in control. What would happen if you were to breathe in the pure dust of that active ingredient? What would happen to your blood pressure?
That is the respiratory challenge that faced Lenny every day. He needed to be protected. In addition, the possibility of getting any of these raw materials in his eyes would not have been good for him, either. What to do?
I attempted to fit-test Lenny in a full-face respirator with HEPA filters. Unfortunately, Lenny is a person whose face is long and lean. I tried two different brands of full-face respirator, but neither gave Lenny the protection he needed. I called my local safety supplier and told him the problem. “Why not try a PAPR?” he suggested. So that’s what we did.
I selected a unit that required one large filter and utilized a hood assembly. Battery life was rated at eight hours plus, and many of the components were disposable, had contamination covers, or could be decontaminated. (In pharmaceutical processing, contamination is everyone’s fear.)
Elijah was another employee who was a problem to fit.His religion forbade his shaving, and he wore a head covering that varied in size. With his beard, any type of tight-fitting respirator was out of the question. That left the PAPR with a loose hood to give him the protection that he needed.
Why are PAPRs the “wonder tool” of PPE? One reason is their versatility. PAPRs can be hooked into halfface, full-face, or hood-type facepieces, including welding helmets; they are self sufficient with a battery pack worn by the user, and an assortment of filters and cartridges are available. They provide cool air to the wearer, and they give Assigned Protection Factors (APF) values from 25 to 1,000, depending upon the facepiece used.
Still, workers may not welcome them in all settings. “My experience with PAPR usage has been mixed. They can be bulky and have employee resistance in hot weather,” said Mike DeVivo of J & M Safety Consulting in Waterbury, Conn.2
“Many of the PAPRs 3M is selling is to help improve employee comfort, rather than primarily for respiratory protection,” said Kevin McGuigan, supervisor of Product Marketing for Powered and Supplied Air and Welding Products for 3M.“They provide eye and full-face protection, in addition to the cooling air circulating around the user’s head. They help keep employees clean.”3
Assigned Protection Factors
Another benefit to PAPRs comes from their having a wide range of assigned protection factors. In August 2006, OSHA promulgated its final rule on assigned protection factors (71 FR 50121)4. The Respiratory Protection Standard, 29 CFR 1910.134, Table 1, provides a listing of APFs for the various combinations of facepieces and types of respirators.
For a PAPR, the APFs range from 25 to 1,000. The only respiratory system with a higher APF is a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) utilized in a positive pressure mode, thus providing an APF of 10,000.
OSHA allows an APF of 1,000 for a PAPR if the manufacturer has test results showing that actual users can achieve that number (note 4 to Table 1)4. Several PAPR manufacturers publish that information, either in instructions for the units or on their Web sites.
This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.