How to report a dust incident
You must report an incident that causes or threatens to cause material harm to human health or the environment.
You must also report incidents where you don’t comply with your business’s EPA licence conditions.
How to respond to a dust complaint
To respond to dust complaints about your business:
- identify the source
- fix the cause of the dust
- keep people who made the complaint informed, where you can.
Keep a record of dust complaint details to help you identify the cause and improve your controls. Records can include:
- complainant name, address, contact number
- wind direction and speed
- temperature
- time of day
- what activities you were carrying out
- what you’ve done to fix the problem.
How to check and update your controls
The general environmental duty means you must eliminate or reduce risks of harm to human health and the environment as far as reasonably practicable.
You must make sure controls you put in place to eliminate or reduce risks are effective and working as planned. Follow a risk management process to help you do this.
Controls may fail due to:
- lack of maintenance
- not being put in place in the right way
- changing site conditions.
If controls are ineffective or not working to plan, you need to find out why and take action. This could include:
- reviewing when and how often you maintain controls
- upgrading controls
- adding controls.
Find out how to control dust from your business.
To make sure your risk management is ongoing, you should continually repeat the four-step risk management process.
Find out more about dust
Reviewed 20 July 2021
