In 2016, DOHSBase’s Theo Scheffers and five co-authors published a peer-reviewed study in Annals of Occupational Hygiene that examined a fundamental question in occupational hygiene: how reliable is hazard banding as a method for estimating safe exposure levels?
The paper — “On the Strength and Validity of Hazard Banding” — provides the scientific validation behind the approach that powers DOHSBase’s kick-off values: grouping substances by their GHS/CLP hazard classification and deriving exposure benchmarks from the statistical distribution of known occupational exposure limits within each group.
What Is Hazard Banding?
Hazard banding (HB) is the process of categorizing chemical substances into bands that reflect increasing health hazard. Each band corresponds to a range of acceptable exposure concentrations. The principle is straightforward: substances with similar hazard profiles should have similar exposure limits.
This is the same principle behind DOHSBase’s kick-off values. When a substance has no formal occupational exposure limit, its H-statements — the standardized hazard descriptors under CLP regulation — can be used to place it in a hazard band and derive a conservative exposure benchmark.
The Study: Four Systems, 229 Substances
Scheffers and colleagues compared four established hazard banding systems:
- DGUV-IFA Spaltenmodell (Germany) — developed by the German Social Accident Insurance
- HSE-COSHH Essentials (United Kingdom) — the Health and Safety Executive’s control banding tool
- BAuA-EMKG (Germany) — the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Easy-to-use Workplace Control Scheme
- Solvay OEB (S-OEB) — an in-house Occupational Exposure Band system
The comparison was performed on 229 substances that had both high-quality GHS/CLP classifications and well-established occupational exposure limit values (OELVs). This dual requirement was essential: it allowed the researchers to test whether hazard bands actually predict where a substance’s OEL falls.
Key Findings
The results revealed both the strength and the limitations of hazard banding:
Agreement varies widely. Only 23-64% of substances received identical band assignments across all four systems. The differences stem from how each system translates GHS hazard codes into bands — the same H-statement may place a substance in band 3 in one system and band 4 in another.
Some systems are stronger than others. The S-OEB system demonstrated the strongest overall performance metrics, with tighter correlation between assigned bands and actual OELVs.
The approach is statistically valid. Despite the differences between systems, hazard banding as a methodology was shown to produce exposure estimates that fall within a defensible range. The concentration ranges associated with each band are statistically meaningful — not arbitrary.
GHS/CLP groupings matter. Different groupings of hazard codes lead to different band assignments and therefore different control regimes. This finding underscores the importance of choosing a well-validated grouping methodology.
The Connection to DOHSBase Kick-Off Values
DOHSBase’s kick-off value methodology builds directly on these principles. Rather than assigning substances to broad bands, DOHSBase:
- Groups substances by their specific H-statement combinations
- Identifies all substances in each group that do have formal OELs
- Calculates the 10th percentile of those OELs — a deliberately conservative benchmark
- Assigns that value as the kick-off value for substances in the group that lack formal limits
This approach, first introduced in 2005 and updated in 2014, has been recognized by the Dutch Labour Inspectorate since 2012 as a valid method for determining exposure benchmarks. The 2016 peer-reviewed study provides the scientific validation that the underlying principle — grouping by hazard classification — is statistically sound.
With over 100,000 kick-off values in the database, this methodology ensures that occupational hygienists have a quantitative starting point for virtually any classified substance, even when no formal OEL exists.
Read the Full Paper
The full paper is freely available in PubMed Central:
Scheffers, T., Doornaert, B., Berne, N., van Breukelen, G., Leplay, A., & van Miert, E. (2016). On the Strength and Validity of Hazard Banding. Annals of Occupational Hygiene, 60(9), 1049-1061. doi:10.1093/annhyg/mew050
Related Presentations and Data
The research presented in this paper was supported by conference presentations and validation analyses:
- Validation of Control Banding and Hazard Grouping — Theo Scheffers, conference presentation (April 2014)
- DNEL vs OELV — Theo Scheffers, AIHce 2014 Ignite session
- Kick-off Values: Introduction and Methodology — Geert Wieling, NVvA presentation (March 2014)
Validation boxplots comparing kick-off values against established hazard banding models:
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