Broken glass hazards

You should always anticipate hazards such as sharp objects like nails, broken glass, and medical needles slippery surfaces steep grades and potentially unstable surfaces such as walls, floors, or roofs that could cause falls, give way, or collapse. Other common physical hazards include ... 

In addition to being harmful to the individual, many chemicals are hazardous to the environment, so waste chemicals must not be put down the sink or into the rubbish bins unless this is stated to be safe. Waste solvent and reagents must be put into appropriate waste bottles. Chlorinated and nonchlorinated solvents are usually kept separately and then sent for disposal by external contractors. Broken glass or needles and scalpels are to be disposed of in sharps containers. 

Use separate labeled containers for general trash, broken glass, for each type of hazardous chemical waste—ignitable, corrosive, reactive, and toxic. 

Any chemistry laboratory is a place that has many sources of hazards, including explosive, toxic or flammable chemicals, noxious vapors, broken glass, and hot liquids and solids. In addition to the rules given below, good practice requires that the instructor and student review each experiment for all potential hazards and discuss steps to avoid or mitigate such hazards. The review should include considerations of dangerous chemicals and conditions in each experiment. 

However, glass as litter remains a serious problem. General education together with adequate and proper disposal facilities will undoubtedly reduce this hazard, but broken glass must still cause concern. Glass, however, has advantages over most other materials as it can be readily cleaned and reused, or recycled via bottle banks as cullet. In the latter case, other than the risk of admixtures (colours and glass types) no deterioration has been reported in properties. 

Glass must be removed from all windows before demolition starts. This will avoid hazards from flying broken glass. The window spaces should be boarded up to deter trespassers. Timber can present three hazards. Injuries caused by protruding nails or sharp and broken edges and pollution and fire if the timber is burnt on site. 

In terms of exposure to a wide variety of laboratory hazards, glassware washing personnel have the greatest exposure to injury of any laboratory worker. They are exposed to biological and chemical agents, chemical disinfectants, detergents, heat, steam, broken glass, chemical... 

Decontaminating. This exposes the worker to the hazards of the steam (or ethylene oxide) sterilizer, to broken glass, and if chemical disinfectants are used, to chemical or irritating agents. 

Washing. The hazards include heat, contact with water and electricity (machine washing), mechanical injury, broken glass, and skin sensitization. 

Drying. The hazards include heat and broken glass. 

Sterilizing. Much of the glassware used in biomedical research must be sterilized before use. The hazards of the steam sterilizer include heat, steam, pressure, broken glass, and mechanical injury. 

Some nitric acid had to be flown from the U.S. to the UK. Several U.S. regulations were broken the acid was packed in glass bottles instead of metal ones and was surrounded by sawdust instead of nonflammable material, and the boxes containing the bottles were not labeled as hazardous or marked This Side Up. The boxes were therefore loaded into the cargo aircraft on their sides, and the bottles leaked. Smoke entered the flight deck, and the crew decided to land, but while doing so the plane crashed, probably as the result of poor visibility on the flight deck, and the crew was killed. It is not clear why a common material of commerce had to be flown across the Atlantic [5]. 

Caution. If the initial r ux described here stops, and the reaction mixture cools, the NEtHjCl will form a solid surface crust. This crust must be broken before any attempt is made to restart die reaction, otherwise there will be a violent bump and subsequent foaming as the solvent breaks die crust. Glass joints can easily be blown apart by this action, and a serious fire-toxicity hazard may ensue. The synthesis should be carried out in a fume hood because of the HCl evolution. 1,1,2,2-Tetrachloroethane is a toxic solvent. 

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