SWEDISH CHEMICAL INDUSTRY

Sweden exhibits a particularly good performance in terms of avoiding fatalities and injuries in this sector. These statistics could support the view that a culture of safety exists in Swedish companies, but chemical risk management in Sweden is arguably simpler for regulators and stakeholders due to fewer total chemicals produced and used within its territories (Section 4.1). This was exemplified during the interview with Swedish chemical industry representatives (paraphrased) ... 

The Swedish chemical industry plays a relatively small part in chemical production of the Europe Union as a whole. Nevertheless the use of hazardous chemical substances is as widespread in Sweden as in all the other countries in the study. Eighty per cent of the Swedish respondents to the European Foundation survey considered th selves very well or fairly well informed about risks resulting from the use of materials,... 

Industrial laboratory work focused on technological improvement of existing processes, for which a chemical understanding was not necessary." Of course there are no sharp lines between chemical and technical improvements, but developments in Swedish chemical industry were predominantly directed towards the latter. One reason was that process details for the phosphate, paper and pulp, and electrochemical industries had been largely imported, often from England, so there was no need to develop new ones. All that was needed was the ability to accommodate already operational technologies to existing local circumstances. 

In Sweden, the national ICE scheme is called ERC (Emergency Response Center). Under a formal agreement between the Swedish Chemical Industry Federation (Kemikontoret) and the Swedish Poison Information Center (GIC) in Stockholm, the center can be contacted in case of a chemical accident. The Poison Center provides only level-1 assistance. Information and advice are based on detailed knowledge of the health hazards of chemical products and appropriate first aid measures. The Poison Information Center has more than 30 year s experience in providing such advice, and chemical companies regularly supply them with updated information on their products. 

SKANSKA, Sweden. Comments on the proposal for a new chemical policy in the European Union - REACH, 9 July 2003 Tetra Pak, Sweden. Comments on the proposal for a new chemical policy in the European Union - REACH, 9 July 2003 Construction Federation, Sweden. Position paper on REACH, 8 July 2003 Swedish Recycling Industries Association. Response to the European... 

If you can see that in some area there are many birth defects or that fish are deformed, that would be a scoop. Deception and buried poisonous waste, or a toxic discharge that some company that is in business today tries to dump. There is a very small chance of that, but it would be a scoop, and the larger the company, the bigger the scoop. And exporting toxic waste to some poor Third World country, e.g. from the electronics industry. All deception is a scoop, even if officials from the Swedish Chemicals Agency were involved in deception. (SvD-reporter)... 

We are grateful to the National Supercomputer Center, Linkoping University, Sweden for the use of the Cray-XMP/48 computer. This work was supported in part by grants from the Swedish Natural Sciences Research Council (NFR), Imperial Chemicals Industries (I.C.I., PLC), England. 

For example, the Franco-American company Rhodia notes that REACH has reinforced its efforts in developing product stewardship programmes and reviewing SDS [526]. Similarly, the Swedish Chemical and Plastic Industry Federation has responded to REACH by launching a major initiative to improve SDS information supplied by its companies [527]. From the other end of the risk communication chain, the Dutch-American company Rohm and Haas has responded with a scheme for collecting data on the chemical contents of its upstream raw materials [528]. 

The saga of brominated flame retardants offers a cautionary tale for the chemical industry.65 These chemicals, developed in the early 1970s, are used in a wide range of consumer products, such as furniture, foam, and plastic casings of electronic devices. In 1998, Swedish scientists reviewing archived human breast milk samples discovered that certain flame retardant chemicals (polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs) had doubled in concentration in Swedish breast milk about every five years over the preceding twenty. This was a source of concern, as studies of laboratory animals had shown that PBDEs dismpt thyroid hormones. Such dismption yields neurobehavioral effects similar to those of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), whose manufacture the United States banned in 1976. 

Silicon is a member of the Group IV elements in the Periodic Table. However, little of the chemistry of silicon can be inferred from carbon, one of its closest neighbors. Although silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth s crust (approximately 26%), it does not exist in nature as a free element. Silicon must be freed from its oxides through a chemical process known as carbothermic reduction. In this reaction, sihca and a carbon source (generally wood) are heated together at extremely high temperatures to yield silicon in its elemental form. The Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius (1824) was the first to isolate silicon from its natural matrix. Sificon is widely used in the electronics and chemical industries. 

It seems plausible to assume that if chemical studies were of use for industry then the relevant work would have been undertaken in research and development laboratories. However, except in the case of Germany not much has been said on laboratories in industry. A preliminary glance at Swedish material from around 1900 reveals that if a laboratory did exist at an industrial plant, it was usually badly equipped, and certainly not well suited to scientific research. Production processes rarely seem to have been directly influenced by science. In production, the laboratory, as well as the science, often disappears from the story, but remained part of its rhetoric. This paper is an attempt, using Swedish examples, to look at scientific activities in industry. In particular, it will enter inside the industrial laboratory in order to observe what kind of work was done there. Hopefully this will lead to an increased awareness of the problematic relations between science, technology and industry, and on the role of chemistry in the development of chemical industry. 

A. Lundgren Between science and industry. The formation of the Swedish Chemical Society (in press). 

The role of chemistry in Swedish industry before 1900 was mainly analytical, regardless of all the rhetoric stating the opposite. The knowledge then needed for industrial development in chemical industry has to be distinguished from the knowledge needed by the chemist doing science in a laboratory, not because industrialists did not see the possibilities in chemistry, but because chemistry did not in practice offer any possibilities. 

Scientific work related to the branches of chemical industry studied here was done in Sweden, but it was neither initiated nor undertaken by industry. Industry relied on the universities or the Royal Technological Institute, Stockholm. This was part of the ordinary job of professional chairholders and others, and was undertaken with the resources that went with the position. Nevertheless these resources were usually too small to initiate any major project of interest to industry. One notable exception, however, was research into wood and paper, headed by Klason at the Royal Technological Institute and financed by a rare governmental allocation from the Swedish Diet. ... 

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