IIW White Paper

6.

Needs and challenges in health, safety, education, training, qualification and certification 6.1 Human and material resources The study of the effects of phenomena occurring during welding fabrication and their effects involves many disciplines, including welding technology, metallurgy, design, industrial hygiene, medicine, ergonomics, epidemiology and many others. The complete understanding of the effects of human activities on the humans themselves and on the surrounding environment seems to be a never ending process because of ongoing changes in the working environment due to the continuous development of materials, technologies and fabrication techniques. In addition, the effects seem to be hardly distinguishable as the workplace environment can be only ideally distinguished from the external environment and the relevant interaction always work as confounding factors. Moreover, despite the fact that the associated hazards are similar all over the world, the precautions taken to control the risks of harm to humans and of the negative effects on the environment which may arise in this work will vary greatly between and within countries. Ideally, agreement would be reached internationally on the best ways forward and the agreed standards and methods would be adopted and applied with equal vigour all over the world to benefit workers and the industry in general. In reality, however, barriers so often spring up to prevent agreement being reached on exactly what should be done, let alone making progress on actually achieving improvements in the workplace. A profitable tool to try to solve the situation might be the use of models and criteria for the design of the welding fabrication process through the use of health and safety and environment management schemes. This needs to be fully integrated economically with the fabrication process, leading to better use of human and natural resources in general, while leading to better quality of the products.

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Through Optimum Use and Innovation of Welding and Joining Technologies

Improving Global Quality of Life