Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
Today’s workplace uses thousands of chemicals, many of which are hazardous. The resources in this section will help guide you in the safe and legal identification, storage, transport, and use of these chemicals, and in making sure that your employees right to know how to be safe around such substances is provided, as required by law.
When it comes to hazardous chemical exposures, airborne exposures get the lion’s share of the attention. The vast majority of permissible exposure limits are airborne exposure limits, and there are many options for characterizing airborne concentrations of chemicals. Instant-read air monitors, colorimetric tubes, and personal sampling pumps can all help you determine just how much […]
Pesticide registrants should review EPA’s draft Pesticide Registration Notice (PRN), which provides guidance on whether they should provide the Agency with a notice regarding minor modifications they wish to make to a registration. The draft would supersede PRNs issued in 1995 and 1998. Those PRNs addressed actions by registrants that do not require extensive EPA […]
How many individual chemicals are workers exposed to in your workplace? How many workers are exposed to those chemicals? How do you keep up with who is exposed to what, and when you need to monitor for each chemical? What about seasonal factors affecting exposures and other changes over time?
Fires reported at a chemical plant east of Houston, which was inundated by forty inches of rain dropped by Hurricane Harvey, highlight in the starkest possible terms the need to exercise all precautions in securing equipment and safety and restarting operations at flood-affected facilities with hazardous chemicals. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board […]
What is the most heavily used pesticide in California? Is it glyphosate (Roundup)? Atrazine? Chlorpyrifos? Actually, it’s none of the above. According to a new report sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the answer is elemental sulfur. Approximately 46 million pounds of sulfur were applied to crops in California in 2013, […]
Nearly every nation has at least one story to tell of a disastrous process safety failure that destroyed lives, property, and critical production installations. These incidents also wreak havoc on a business’s regional, and sometimes national or international, reputation—not to mention its stock price. The cost of effective process safety management pales in comparison to […]
The EPA has published a final rule establishing content requirements and deadlines for electronic data submissions that will allow the Agency to designate chemicals in the Toxic Substances Control Act’s (TSCA) Chemical Substance Inventory as either active or inactive. The rule is required by the 2016 TSCA amendments to clarify the status of the more […]
Yesterday we discussed the new silica standard as it applies to general industry and maritime workplaces and focused on the requirements for a written exposure control plan. Today we will provide some tips for employee training under the new standard.
As announced in its reporting and recordkeeping rule for nanomaterials (January 12, 2017, FR), the EPA has issued final guidance on specific compliance issues associated with the rule. The guidance consists of the Agency’s answers to 53 questions presumably asked by the public in connection with the final rule and a draft of the guidance […]
An Ohio manufacturer of cast steel freight components is facing more than $610,000 in penalties after Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigators found workers at the facility exposed to machine hazards and silica. OSHA found, in part, that the company failed to implement engineering controls to lower exposure to silica. In addition to the […]