Pottery Clay Making Safety

Video Transcript

"Before we go any further talking about how to mix a clay to use in pottery, I want to talk about safety as it relates to that process. Now the biggest health hazard in any ceramic studio environment is dust. Clay materials are basically dust. It's everywhere. When it's in a wet form, and it's bound up with water, it's not a problem, but when it dries out, drops on the floor and gets crushed up, becomes airborne again by sweeping or just walking around. Breathing that dust can seriously damage your lungs over time. Now, when we're mixing the clay, this is even more important because we're dealing with the raw powdered materials. Some of these materials are so finely powdered they're roughly three microns, no one third of a micron in size. Now that's so small that you can't possibly see it, and it's small enough that if it were to be closed in a room with no air currents it could potentially stay airborne for up to three days, which means that it's all around you, and as you're breathing that material in it can become embedded in your lungs and over a long period of time cause a degenerative disease called silicosis, which is roughly like getting emphysema. It builds scar tissue inside your lungs that never goes away. So, what's really important to be conscious of how much dust you're creating and how must dust you're breathing in. And we can minimize that with the use of respirators. Now, there's two different kinds of respirators. This is the big boy here. This is a full rubber face mask respirator with chemical cartridges. It's a filter. This one, these are designed to filter organic vapors so they will take out really fine particles from the air and prevent them from entering your lungs. They're a little heavy, a little bulky, and a little uncomfortable to wear, but that's not an excuse to not do it. So, what you might opt for instead, which is almost as effective and much more comfortable are these disposable respirators. Now, these are not the little paper dust masks that you see in a doctor's office for instance or something like that. These are thick material, and they have they're specifically designed for certain amount of filtration and the small, thin, flimsy paper dust masks are just not good enough to do the trick. In fact, they're worst than not wearing a respirator at all because they low you into a false sense of security. This is an actual respirator, and it needs to say Nyosh N ninety-five, or P ninety-five, or R ninety-five. That's the degree of filtration that the respirator provides to you. You can buy these at any home improvement store for about two dollars a piece, and they're disposable, and they're pretty comfortable to wear. This one even has a little exhalation valve in the front so that it's more comfortable to breath through. But really important to be conscious of this when you're mixing clay to use for pottery."