The term “shoe” covers a wide range of products made from various materials. Organic solvents (OS) are components of various products such as the adhesives which are used in many industries. The shoe industry consumes large amounts of adhesives. This chemical risk assessment (CRA) is to validate the hypothesis of decreasing gradient of RA craft enterprises to industrial enterprises through the semi-industrial. The simplified methodology CRA of INRS was applied. For each chemical, a hazard class is assigned based on the sign, and then the potential exposure class is determined according to parameters “quantity and frequency of use”. Our RA process is complete with ambient measurements for solvents to which employees are most frequently exposed. Adhesives being constituted as solvent mixture, we have conventionally used an exposure index which is compared with the limit values. The simplified method CRA of INRS was chosen because it is one of the reference methods in RA established from the Kinney model. If these atmospheric samples and toxicology tests were made for the first time in the shoe industry in Sfax, they concerned a sample of companies of the three shoe manufacturing processes preceded by a preliminary RA with post-study and inventory of products handled.
Part of the book: Adhesives