More monitoring and education will help prevent black lung in New South Wales, authorities say.

While black lung appears to be on the rise in Queensland, a mining safety conference has heard that NSW’s strict dust management guidelines could be keeping it down

Industry body Coal Services — which is jointly owned by the NSW Minerals Council and the mining division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union — says it has the mining industry backing to prevent black lung.

Coal Services CEO Lucy Fleming outlined that state’s dust mitigation and control techniques in her presentation to the NSW Mining Health, Safety and Environment Conference.

The measures include ventilation standards, policies for respiratory protection and even rules that tell workers the correct position to stand in.

“One of the key learnings is that the disease is 100 per cent preventable,” Ms Fleming said.

“So we look at what we are doing in New South Wales to stop people inhaling the dust and developing the disease and also how are we monitoring it.

“If they make sure all the proper ventilation is in place in a mining operation — that the dust mitigation processes are in place and the workers are all standing in the right position, backed up by proper respiratory protection — there's no reason why a worker would suffer from that disease today.

“Our industry is very compliant; we have a very strong regulation of mandatory dust monitoring in New South Wales.

“That means that over a period of time, every shift on every long wall and other areas of the mine is monitored for dust and we record all of that information.

“The benefit of monitoring is that pneumoconiosis is a long latency-type of disease, so it doesn't just happen after one [incident] of dust exposure, it happens after a very long progressive time.

“We're trying to pick up very early in the piece if there is an [excess] of dust in a mine so we can help that mine operator remedy those issues to prevent it being a long-term exposure; that's how we can protect the worker,” she said.