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.
The EPA says that it is cutting into the backlog of new chemical reviews required under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and expects to have the number of ongoing cases down to its “typical baseline” of about 300 by the end of July 2017.
The future of trichloroethylene (TCE) in an industrial process called vapor degreasing is balanced to some extent on the outcome of an EPA proposal under which the Agency would use its authority under Section 6(a) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to prohibit the manufacturing (including importing), processing, and distribution in commerce of TCE […]
The West Fertilizer Company in West, Texas operated out of a building that was originally constructed in 1961. The facility was expanded, piecemeal, over the next 52 years, but its underlying construction remained the same: a wood-framed building with asphalt shingles and plywood bins for storing fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate (FGAN) and other bulk agricultural materials, […]
In the first hours after a catastrophe, there’s a lot of confusion and a lot of unanswered questions. How extensive was the damage? Who was affected? How many were injured? How many were killed? Is the crisis past, or is damage-control ongoing?
By Phil Molé, EHS and Sustainability Expert, VelocityEHS OSHA’s Laboratory Standard (29 CFR 1910.1450) covers workers in laboratories where relatively small quantities of chemicals are used on a non-production basis. Hazardous chemical use in other contexts, including quality control testing or any production of chemicals for commercial sale, is regulated under other standards. All employers […]
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) says the 2015 explosion at the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, California, could probably have been prevented if a more rigorous process safety management (PSM) system had been in place.
Nitrous oxide (N2O), a substance that is stable under normal handling and circumstances, exploded when it became overheated in a pump being operated at an Airgas facility in Florida in August 2016, reported the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB). The explosion resulted in the death of the worker operating the pump, the only person at […]
The EPA has declined to grant a petition from environmental groups that requested that the Agency use its authority under Section 4 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to require that manufacturers and processors of chlorinated phosphate esters (CPEs) conduct testing on these substances to determine their health and environmental effects during their full […]
As discussed in yesterday’s Advisor, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) recently released a draft guidance for more quickly categorizing workplace chemical exposures through banding. Today we will consider the potential use of the guidance for environment, health, and safety (EHS) managers.
Since the development of occupational exposure limits (OELs) for chemicals used in the workplace is so time-consuming and resource intensive, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has developed a new and faster way for initially categorizing chemical hazard exposures—band it! We’ll take a look at a draft document recently released by NIOSH […]