What’s the difference between non licensed works and notifiable non licensed works?
In this episode Neil and Ian answer a question sent in from the asbestos knowledge empire community. What’s the difference between non licensed works and notifiable non licensed works? They provide examples of typical non licensed works, what may affect these and make them notifiable.
Transcript:
Ian: Welcome to Asbestos Knowledge Empire. I am Ian Stone.
Neil: And I’m Neil Munro. So today we are going to talk about, we have a question that came in from some of the Asbestos Knowledge Empire Facebook community and they ask what’s the difference between non-licensed works and notifiable non-licensed works. And particularly attention between why does it change? So for instance why is the material that is non-licensed suddenly turn into a notifiable work? So we kind of want to answer those questions today. So essentially what it is, why is the material that is non-licensed during removal suddenly become notifiable? So why it’s kind of cover that off in today’s podcast. Just to kind of differentiate so we’ll know where we’re at. It is kind of the three levels of removal: non-licensed non-notifiable, non-licensed but notifiable, and then the fully licensed and fully notifiable asbestos work. The third category is for the higher risk, high fiber content stuffs such as logging, insulating boards, sprays, that types of stuff. We are not talking about that today. Today, we are talking about the lowest materials, the asbestos cement, the textured coatings, that kind of stuff. Aren’t we?
Ian: Yeah, volatiles. It might be a cement flow pipe, those types of lower risk sort of asbestos bound of into matrix type of materials.
Neil: So first off, non-notifiable non-licensed removal would look like say a garage roof, cement garage roof, corrugated garage roof it’s in a good condition upon reviewing the contract to has a look and decides that’s not likely to disintegrate or deteriorate during the removal process. They can crop the bolts easily, removes the sheets easily, place them down and wrap them and essentially it is kind of like removing a cement sheet whole that is in a good condition.
Ian: Yup.
Neil: Minimal breakage, minimal risk kind of altogether really so that is non-licensed non-notifiable work.
Ian: Yeah, so to give you another example so you’ve got asbestos texture coating has been applied to a plaster board ceiling. Generally speaking the removal of that is the contractor won’t remove as much as possible whole sheets of the plaster board, so they will be hoist from their fixings lifted down to the floor, wrapped up and disposed of. So it will be some breakage of the texture coating but it will be minimal.
Neil: Yeah, it is minimal because like you said the board and its hold and its entirety is pretty much removed.
Ian: Yeah, so essentially you are not removing really the actual asbestos product but more the product that has been applied to. So that would be classed as non-licensed. Now, to flip those two examples over so when would they become notfifiable?
Neil: Well, let’s take the garage roof example for instance. If you look at the garage roof and before you start works it is already deteriorated. You can see it is notifiable. You can see it is damaged. You can see it looks brittle.
Ian: Yeah, one of those [unclear – 3:51] ones so it’s really gone, you know, it’s really been suffered severe damage from weather you know. It has been, had moss grown on it and it stands really deteriorated and become weak and brittle.
Neil: Yeah, so if you look at it and you think that will straight away, a lot of bell should ring because when you touch that, when you start man handling that you know it is going to breakup.
Ian: Yes, it is going to start. It is snapping in your hands really isn’t it?
Neil: Yeah, so straight away that would become notifiable before the job starts.
Ian: Yeah, another example is if it was a roof that had been maybe I don’t know over clad or it is been sometimes they used to apply, and I have seen this on a lot of domestics, where it is been uses shattering as well and you’d have to break the material out so that would then be classed as notifiable where you get some sort of machinery, maybe a small hand can go just to sort of break that material up. You are basically disturbing the matrix of the material and you degrade the actual asbestos material to actually remove it. So the texture coating example how would that become notifiable?
Neil: So again the texture coating, so the same asbestos material but it’s been applied to a different scenario so for instance where you’ve got either a concrete ceiling or it’s been applied to a wall, you know. That maybe a plastered wall or it may be a brick or [unclear – 5:08] wall.
Ian: So literally the texture coating straight on the surface of the wall not on plaster board or anything like that, straight unto the hard surface.
Neil: So it completely change the removal process because you can’t remove it whole. You can’t remove it on the whole sheet. You’ve not got to go into either a scrape pin or mechanical removal process. So if it’s been applied to some plaster on the wall it is quite easy to sort of chip the plaster of but you have to use either hand tools or mechanical process to actually break that material off. And as you can imagine it is really sort of messy process. You are going to completely destroy the actual matrix of the asbestos material to get that off, that then just become a higher risk removal process. And for instance it’s been applied to a concrete ceiling you are then looking at either using sort of removal gels, chemicals to obviously loosen that material off and it is literally just scraping off the surface so again you’re completely breaking down the matrix of the asbestos material itself therefore making it a slightly higher risk removal process and therefore it falls into the notifiable class crew. Just a couple of examples of the difference between those. We’ve talked about the actual notification process so the works have to be notified before they are starting that, that could be anytime wherever it is a month, a week or even just five minutes before the works start. There is a couple of additional things at the actual contractor or the employer of the contractor need to do if it is undertaken notifiable works and that’s medical surveillance and keeping the health records for those individuals. There is a bit more to it and generally speaking if you are employing non-licensed contractors definitely the works fall into notifiable category. You need to be asking are they suitable for doing those works because they are generally a little bit high risk. They are high risk I mean for both non-notifiable, notifiable works the contractor needs to have similar things in place as well which often get overlooked and I never spoke about this on previous podcast but just a bit of a recap, insurances, risk assessments, plans of works, face fit, testing for the guys and the masks.
Ian: You have to check in certified equipments. It is a real biggie, and you make sure there are DOP tests on the [unclear – 7:16] and stuff like that and that’s really important. Because just going back to those jobs, you know, especially texture coating ones the removal process on those they are horrible jobs especially when you are using chemicals to remove it from the texture coating. These jobs are really horrible and they are messy.
Neil: It is labor intensive. It is literally a cold phase scraping it off.
Ian: Scraping it off because of the wet material it just goes everywhere. It flops everywhere. Now, if these contractors are not geared for that butt up work you can get into all sorts of problems with this texture coatings basically just goes everywhere. If it is not being [unclear – 7:48] the enclosure. Essentially you can’t do those works really without if not full enclosure. So non-licensed, just normal standard non-licensed contractors, they are not generally geared up for building enclosures.
Neil: Unless you could point actually because when you think about it asbestos contractors that build enclosures day in and day out. It is cooler than art form. If anybody has ever had to go try a layout big thousand gauge pulley so it is meet or delete. It covers everything. It is a pain in the ass. It is a real real difficult.
Ian: Yeah, because you have to get the sheet in crisp because if you don’t you get stuff stuck in place. It just corrects automatically.
Neil: Yeah, in the folds and the rest of it and then you take it all down and before you know they shit all over the floor because you didn’t see it. Because literally that texture coating just goes everywhere, yeah. I would always recommend using the licensed contractor but particularly we’re the notifiable non-licensed stuff. Again, ever more of a reason to use a licensed contractor. The set up for that they are geared up for it for any eventually whereas the non-licensed contractors if something does go wrong, or it does go right, not according to plan, well, they might have to stop the job and come back to it or get another contractor in which could be a pain because they are not set up for it.
Ian: And they are going to fold to the background knowledge as well. There is occasions where non-licensed works can slip into the licensed category depending on the material they are working on and the removal process. There are occasions where you can slip into that category. And if you’ve got a licensed contractor on the job they are going have to acknowledge the background. They are going to have previous experience in doing those works. They are going to have the air monitoring results to backup that up and they are professionals it’s what they do day in and day out. Yeah, remember, asbestos first not last.
