It's becoming more and more clear to me that current chemical safety training is in dire need of improvement. And I'm not just talking about big industrial factories here.
COSHH, or The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 is how the UK government ensure safe use and control of hazardous substances. COSHH is a statutory body of regulations in the United Kingdom. It places certain requirements on employers to ensure that employees and other visitors to a workplace are protected from hazardous substances.
Dear friends! Starting this year, we are launching a project to protect producers and consumers from the negative effects of chemicals on human health MCFN COHH.
Today I want to talk to you about the side-effects of poorly handled chemical safety. These are the things the safety authorities don't want you to know! I also want to tell you about - The new COSHH Risk Assessor Certification™.
Often there is confusion over which body of regulations you need to follow when the substances you are working with possess properties that are similar but can be categorised differently, under separate regulatory bodies. Both COSHH and DSEAR are very similar in that employers must fully assess hazards and control the risks that come from handling, using, storing or transporting hazardous or dangerous substances. What then, are the differences between COSHH and DSEAR?
COSHH is about creating a COSHH assessment that controls risk in any given task that can then be used to adequately train the operator to carry out that task safely.
Getting safety right and ensuring your people are safe from exposure to hazardous materials is a time-consuming and repetitive task.
Managing the reputation of your company is crucial if it's going to grow. Companies whose service is so good you want to shout about it sell more and their customers remain loyal for longer. This usually means they can charge a premium for their services. I know I don't mind paying slightly more if top-notch service is a guarantee.
Unfortunately, even today, there are a lot of employers who still don't understand the COSHH regulations and what is required of them. Employers whose company uses dangerous chemicals, or produces hazardous substances through a work process, are required to perform COSHH assessments on every one of those work activities.
Due to the way we live and work, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can be found everywhere around us, most of the time. VOC is a classification given to certain chemicals that easily and quickly evaporate and develop into odorous gases and vapours that can significantly increase the accumulation of potentially hazardous substances in the air, especially when released indoors.
Solvents have been in use for many years across a wide range of industries. Most of the products that we use every day are created using solvents in the production process. This includes chemical manufacture, obviously, but also your daily food and beverages.
Silica is another one of those things that is all around us without us really knowing it. It's got a plethora of applications and is used widely throughout many industries around the world.
It's quite likely that you've seen silica out there in nature as it normally exists, as quartz, but it's also one of Mother Nature's main ingredients for sand in many places around the world as well as being the second most abundant mineral is our planets crust.
If you work in the hospitality business you'll know that the safety of your guests, and the cleanliness of your hotel is vitally important.
Common cleaning products are often disregarded as low risk but these products are still chemicals and they're extremely bad for human health, if handled or stored incorrectly.
We have already talked about COSHH, what it does for chemical safety and why it's imperative that we continue to follow and improve upon those regulations. Today I want to talk about REACH and how it complements COSHH to further improve health and safety. Both COSHH and REACH call for risk assessments to be taken, just at different times and by different people.
We all know that air pollution is bad for us and our environment, but it's now been confirmed as the number one threat to human health across the globe. It's been linked directly to early brain development problems among other frighteningly severe detrimental health effects in humans.
I came across a great bit of news earlier this morning that will be great for tackling the use of hazardous substances that are deemed a major concern to public health and the planet.
It's now 2020 and people are still not certain? Why? I mean health and safety laws (which, yes includes COSHH) were put into place many years ago to protect employees from injuries and accidents at work.
Today I want to clear up the confusion pertaining to which is needed to safely handle, use and store hazardous substances. It is a question that often comes up when business owners need to certificate training in health and safety.
Proper COSHH storage method and placement should be dictated by your risk
assessments.
Getting safety right and ensuring your people are safe from exposure to hazardous materials is a time-consuming and repetitive task.
There are regulations to follow, of course. Lot's of them. But, they're usually difficult to read, let alone understand and meeting them is a huge undertaking that saps time and manpower from other work.