Purchasing department, hazardous

Check with the purchasing department to ensure that all hazardous chemicals purchased are included on your list. 

A PPE risk assessment is used to ensure the PPE is properly selected for both the hazard and to the employee exposed to the hazard (Managing Worker Safety and Health, n.d.).The JHA provides the information and starting point for the PPE risk assessment. Do not assume that the purchasing department or the leadership team understands PPE selection. 

A generator s hazardous waste must be evaluated to decide if it may be exempt from being considered a hazardous waste or, if not, if it is a listed waste, as defined above, or meets any of the criteria for a hazardous waste. A large percentage of laboratory wastes are likely to fall under one of these provisions and must be treated as a hazardous waste. A major problem with many chemicals produced by laboratory activities, as opposed to chemicals that are purchased, is that they are insufficiently identified. The identity of the chemical in a bottle, for example, labeled solution A may have been known perfectly well by the individual who labeled it at the time the label was affixed to the bottle, but even this person may not recall the contents several months later. As often happens, the chemical is an orphan left behind by a departed graduate student or employee, in which case the identity of the contents may be even more uncertain. Commercial waste disposal firms will normally not accept these unknown containers until they are characterized. Other examples of unknown chemicals which also must be identified are older containers that have lost their labels or whose labels may have become damaged so that the contents cannot be determined. In all cases of unknowns, there is a certain amount of risk... 

What are the responsibilities of environmental managers Find someone who has environmental responsibilities for his company and ask what his major responsibilities are. Ask specifically about filing MSDSs with the fire department and emergency planning officials. Also ask about what training is required for workers to respond to spills of any hazardous chemicals on the property. Ask this person which CFRs are available on-site and if you can take a look at them. Some companies now purchase these on CD-ROM, so it s hard to get a feel for the scope of the regulations. 

A risk assessment can be used quite naturally in the process of drafting a User Requirements Specification (URS) for equipment utilities. By clarifying the intended use of the equipment and investigating the hazards, their possible causes and ways to control them in the actual context, the URS will be a fine starting point for purchasing and for the subsequent qualification. The risk assessment is to be updated as sorai as actual brands and types of a specific piece of equipment have been chosen. As a conclusion a level of risk can be determined for specific equipment, placed in specific locations and used for weU-defined purposes. If such a level of risk is determined for several pieces of equipment in a department, it may serve other purposes as well, for instance prioritising validadmi and frequency of maintenance or determination of the replacement period for specific equipment. 

In 1980 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) wrote a regulation called the Hazard Communication Standard ( HazCom ) that required all chemical suppliers to provide MSDSs to chemical users. These MSDSs, described more below, provide an organized document that lists a wide variety of safety information about a chemical. For the past three decades, academic chemistry departments like yours and all other organizations that purchase and use chemicals have been required to have on hand, either in hard copy or electronic format, MSDSs so that employees have access to safety information about chemicals they would be using in their job. So, it is very likely that you will encounter MSDSs as a science smdent and a scientist and it is important to know how to read them intelligently. (More about this below.)... 

The noninvolvement of staff functions and service components in hazard control can hinder success. Do not ignore a natural interface of hazard control management with other support functions such as facility management, purchasing, and human-resource management. Virtually every department and function of a modern organization contributes in some way to the effectiveness of the hazard control... 

---