I think it is about time for “the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to reevaluate the study issued in 1998 that they say found no direct link between health and postal dust, but did discover that sorting machines could send potentially carcinogenic volatile organic compounds (such as ink) and other irritants like dust mites into the air.” This 1998 study is over 10 years old and there are more automated sorting machines per center than there were in 1998, i.e.: more dust. This will be an ongoing problem for the U.S. Postal Service and its employees for years to come.

And the lackadaisical attitude of management to possible hazardous materials is also dangerous for all concerned. We had an envelope “explode” in a DBCS that was from a presort tray of a mass-mailer. Management told everyone it was makeup as soon as it was reported. Management then shut down the DBCS, called maintenance to clean the machine, moved the operators to another machine and continued the run, and called a casual over to sweep the machine. The next crew to come in was assigned to that machine to run mail. No one recovered the envelope it came from.

And the mail must move on.

When I say “inside” I mean literally INSIDE of the machines vacuuming out this dust.
I can attest to the fact that this stuff is very irritating to the throat and chest. I am a smoker so I have never even tried to say it was the dust.. I already know what their response would be.
But if I have a slight cold or sore throat problem while doing a normal day at work it is very much worse than any problems I have when I am not at work.

Example: I was off for 4 weeks for an unrelated surgery. While I was off I had I had a slight cold, no asthmatic symptoms, no throat pain just a simple cold, it ran its 2 or 3 day course. After a few days back at work.. I start coughing, having spells of deep coughs that hurt my chest. In my case it feels somewhat chronic as long as I am at work every day. Do I blame the dust… do I blame the smoking?? I know what the USPS will say.

I have never been “rotated around to avoid perpetual exposure to potentially harmful or aggravating activities” and I do not wear a mask. The environment is setup to make the operators comfortable, when we do our maintenance, a mask only makes breathing even harder and will increase your body temp to an uncomfortable working level.

By the way, the USPS changed its machine cleaning methods because of the Anthrax incidents of 2001, not the study done in 1998. The dust is even worse around Christmas season. We literally breath in glitter and other things from the cards sent through the machines.

The other day I was cleaning a machine that had a tube of “skin cream” that had busted out of an envelope and was rubbing on some pulleys and belts and scattered everywhere. I asked my supervisor if it would be considered a hazard, he said.. “its skin cream.. its fine” problem was there was no label. There was only the letter it came out of with the words “skin cream” written on the front and back from the sender. I would ask that people consider the fact that whatever they send in a letter sized envelope , just remember that it will be squeezed between hundreds of rollers and belts with the clearance of less than 1/8 inch many thousands of times before it gets to the other person.
Dust is an issue!! Things get stuck in the machines and just burn away as they are stuck against machine parts for hours sometimes before they are noticed.