Risk assessment and management in environmental engineering laboratories to determine biological risk factors

Occupational accidents and occupational diseases increase expeditiously. In parallel with this situation, awareness of people about occupational health and safety increases and the importance of taking necessary precautions are seen clearly. The significant obligations have been become valid by the change in the legislation. Thereafter, public institutions have to establish and apply occupational health and safety systems. In departments consisting of laboratories, like environmental engineering, occupational health and safety has more importance. Hazards in work environment and risks caused by the hazards have to be defined to provide safety for employee and students. Biological materials like soil, wastewater, wastewater sludge and solid waste are studied directly in environmental engineering laboratories. Hence, determining the biological risk factors with other types of risks in the environmental engineering laboratories and understanding the importance of the biological risk factors among other risk factors are aimed. DEU risk assessment method and FMEA have been used to determine risks in the laboratories. Moreover, surveys were applied to workers and laboratory managers. As a result, it was determined that the DEU risk assessment method evaluates existing situation. It considers the working hours of the workers with hazard and the positive effect of taken measurements. On the other side, FMEA evaluates the risks as there is no precaution. Moreover, the workers have the highest work perception for workplace conditions. In a similar manner, workplace problems were found as very important in both risk assessments. 60 percent of the workers have high risk perception for biological and ergonomic risks. Moreover, biological and ergonomic risks were evaluated as important with DEU risk assessment method and as very important with FMEA. The numbers of workers having high and low risk perception for physical, chemical and psychological risks is equal. To conclude, the workers have awareness about the risks in their workplaces but not all of them have. The reason can be that they don't know what the risks are or they suppose that they have knowledge about risks. As a result of the risk assessment, it was found that chemical and biological risks have more importance than others in the environmental engineering research laboratories.