Dust Issues Resulting in Quartz Production Process

The main processes and operations carried out are stone crushing, grinding, sieving, and screening, mixing, storing and bagging. The dust generated by each of these operations contains a very high amount of free silica, and exposure over a long period above the Permissible Limit of Exposure (Government of India, 1987) may lead to serious occupational diseases. Dust generated at the workplace also gets dispersed in the vicinity and causes health risk to the public and environment. Therefore, the present assessment of dust exposure and work environmental conditions has been carried out.

During the manufacturing process, it was observed that a large amount of airborne dust is generated in each of these operations. On some occasions, the normal visibility was greatly reduced by the presence of high amounts of airborne dust in the work environment. Workers were using cloth pieces to prevent the inhalation of dust. No personal protective equipment was provided to the workers. In a number of manufacturing enterprises, women workers come to the workplace with their infants who, along with their mothers, are equally exposed to the dust. However, workers might not be exposed to a dusty atmosphere for more than four hours in a shift.

Due to poor cleanliness and housekeeping, the accumulation of dust deposited on all parts of the surfaces of machines as well as on the shop door has been observed.  is generally located outside the shed in the open atmosphere. Dust generated by the stone crusher and various operations in the units gets dispersed into the surroundings and carried away from the workplace by the wind, thereby creating hazards to health as well as nuisance to the people living near the manufacturing industry.

In some of the manufacturing enterprises, there were provisions for dampening and wetting the stones before they were fed to the crusher. However, it was stated by the management that the dampening and wetting of stones at the initial stage does not help in producing a quality product as the mass becomes sticky, which renders it unsuitable for sub- sequent processing. As such, manipulation of stones at present does not comply with the provisions relating to the control of dust at the source (Ministry of Labour, 1987). In consideration of these specific and serious problems of dust emission and its further dispersion in the work atmosphere, recommendations for the control of dust have been given to the management of the quartz manufacturing industry.

Since most enterprises manufacture similar pro- ducts from the same basic raw material with mostly identical processes, it was decided to restrict the study to six enterprises. A, B and C were stone crushing enterprises located in Jaipur, in the industrial area, residential area and mining area, respectively. Quartz manufacturing enterprises D, E and F were located in the industrial area of Ajmer. D and F manufacture quartz powder from quartz stones by . Enterprise E manufactures quartz powder by using a special stone (feldspar) as the raw material.