Industrial hygiene in Tucson: defense plants and their suppliers

Tucson has an industrial mix all its own: defense manufacturing and the large base of suppliers and fabricators that support it. It also answers to a different air agency from the Phoenix metro.

Our field is industrial hygiene, the discipline behind workplace air monitoring and noise surveys.

Pima County, not ADEQ

For most sources in the Tucson area, air permits come from the Pima County Department of Environmental Quality, not the state. Maricopa County has its own department for Phoenix.

If you operate in both metros, you have two county air agencies plus the state agency, ADEQ (the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality). If you keep a register of compliance obligations, one that names only ADEQ is incomplete.

We do not handle air permits. We name the agencies here so your register is right.

→ How to build a compliance obligations register

Defense manufacturing

Raytheon, an RTX business, has its main missile design and production site in Tucson, with a large base of suppliers around it.

Aerospace and defense plants bring together two of the harder substances to sample correctly:

• Hexavalent chromium, from chromate conversion coatings and chromated primers
• Isocyanates, from polyurethane topcoats. They require a specially treated filter, known as a derivatizing filter, and the wrong filter gives you no result at all, not a wrong one.

→ Hexavalent chromium air sampling · Isocyanate air sampling · Aerospace plants

What we do here

We work in four fields here:

• Tier II chemical inventory reporting (due March 1)
• Form R / TRI reporting (due July 1)
• Air monitoring surveys and noise surveys
• ISO consulting for environmental management (ISO 14001) and for occupational health and safety (ISO 45001)

We travel from Phoenix, and it is a routine trip for us, not an expedition.

→ Where we work