Where did control banding originate?
The concept of control banding was developed in the late 1980s by occupational health experts in the pharmaceutical industry. This industry uses large numbers of new chemical compounds with few toxicity data. The experts reasoned that such compounds could be classified into bands by their toxicity and by their need for restriction of exposure. Each band was aligned with a control scheme. Early references on the concept included a manual published by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in October 1995 and a paper by Naumann et al. [1996] (see reference list below). In the early 1990s, as the European system for classification and labeling developed, occupational health experts began to examine the alignment between the classification, the exposure limit, and data on exposure and control systems [Gardner and Oldershaw 1991].
