Point-of-sale glass bottle recycling: indoor airborne exposures and symptoms among employees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: To assess the impact of newly introduced point-of-sale glass bottle recycling on indoor air quality and employee health. METHODS: Airborne exposures and both chronic and acute respiratory and somatic symptoms were surveyed among 226 employees at 36 randomly selected liquor stores with bottle recycling and in-house glass breaking. Each store was visited twice; between visits glass breaking was discontinued for one month in half the stores (selected at random), although bottles were still collected and stored on site. Rates of chronic symptoms were compared to an external, unexposed control population. RESULTS: Geometric mean exposure levels were 0.18 mg/m3 for inhalable particulate matter and 3.6 EU/m3 for endotoxin (270 personal samples); 1064 CFU/m3 for viable fungi (648 area samples). Fungal levels were associated with visibly mouldy bottles being broken, outdoor fungal counts, and uncovered glass bins. Exposures were not altered by the intervention of shutting down glass breaking machinery. Compared to controls, employees reported more work related chronic chest tightness and chronic nasal symptoms. Acute chest symptoms were associated with breaking visibly mouldy bottles, but not with measured fungal counts. Inhalable particulate matter levels >0.2 mg/m3 were associated with acute upper airway irritation. Somatic symptoms were associated with measures of psychosocial job strain. CONCLUSION: Results suggest that this type of recycling programme may generate fungal exposures sufficient to elicit upper airway and chest symptoms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".