Safety concepts for chemistry

Chemical Health and Safety Concepts for the Chemistry Curriculum... 

Chemical safety is a primary focus of professional industrial hygiene. Most standard chemistry curricula cover background information necessary for chemical health and safety, but do not specifically cite hygiene principles. There is little use of chemical health and safety principles even though they can successfully communicate essential chemical principles. Safety concepts are easily included as a meaningful component of chemical education. Incorporation can be achieved by consistent use of safety concepts coupled with an "introductory" chapter. This paper outlines topics and provides examples that can be integrated throughout a text and/or included in a proposed Chemical Health and Safety chapter. 

These are two of the many principles that have been defined for green chemistry, we mentioned some other principles earlier health, safety, energy efficiency, and so on. Such technology can best be quantitatively analyzed with a thorough thermodynamic analysis in which the concepts we presented in Part II, and which are closely related to energy, its quality and its losses, are most prominent. But let us follow these researchers as they reported their remarkable achievements and conclusions in the Scientific American [62]. 

However, global competiveness and market should be considered. This is the real barrier for a more sustainable industrial chemistry. Therefore, the real step forward could derive only when the product value of chemical compounds also includes components related to the process of production, its impact on environment and safety of operations. We live in a global world, not only economically but also environmentally, where the impact of industrial production and human activities is no longer on a local scale. The value of products should thus not be related only to the local cost of production, which hides part of the effective costs (for the environment, for example, or for society, when risk is too high). It is thus necessary to adopt transparent procedures where cost is not only determined from the market but also includes the production procedures. This concept of traceability of chemical products is one of the concepts around which the new REACH legislation was built. The next section discusses in more detail this legislation, because it is an important component for the sustainability of chemistry and industrial chemical production not only inside Europe. 

ASTM Saul Patai s book "The Chemistry of Peroxides" (41) was reviewed with some hope of finding either a systematic evaluation of reactivity as it relates to the potential hazard of peroxides or some basic concepts that would allow formulation of a unifying theory that would permit an algorithmic solution to the classification problem. Unfortunately, when Saul got to the chapter on safety he acknowledges that he gave up. Bretherick s "Handbook of Reactive Chemical Hazards" (42) presents some useful information and incident histories, but provides little in the way of coordinated insight based on molecular composition and structure to allow for systematic extrapolation to new materials. 

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