Page 41 - Occupational Health & Safety, April 2017

tion, its share price significantly tumbled. What happened in Vietnam is not new; chemical pollution and accidental spills are commonplace at sites across the planet. In China, more than 40 per- cent of rivers are considered unsafe for drinking, largely because of unregulated chemical use and incidents of pollution. Every second, 310 kg of toxic chemicals are released into our air, land, and water by industrial facilities—that’s 10 million
tonnes of pollution.
And being responsible for the impact
of a chemical disaster—on staff, local com- munities, the environment, and the local economy—is every CEO’s nightmare. Ac- cording to Accenture and the Conference Board, more than one-third of 500 top U.S. CEOs named chemical-related environ- mental health and safety issues among the biggest concerns in their businesses and in- dustries, placing it in the top five on the list of responses.
The Importance of Building a Chemical Inventory
With more than 70,000 chemicals currently in common use and 1,000 new chemicals coming into use every year, maintaining and managing their effective, appropriate, and responsible use is a challenging task. Cost, process, regulatory, and safety issues converge to make chemical management a critical, complex, and cumbersome activity. But by implementing a range of measures on site and across businesses, the risks asso- ciated with chemical use can be eliminated. To start, it is important to have a solid un- derstanding of exactly what chemicals are being used at each facility and what com- pliance documentation is required for each chemical, including waiver documentation, if appropriate. Building out an inventory of chemicals is crucial to fully understanding how exposed your business might be—not only to regulatory non-compliance, but also to the risk of pollution or breaches of internal health and safety policies.
For Kimberly Williams, an inventory services manager for the chemical data management business SiteHawk, an accu- rate chemical inventory is the foundation for your overall chemical management initiatives and globally harmonized system (GHS) compliance. “Similar to building a house, periodic chemical inventories will ensure there are no cracks in your foun-
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dation,” she said. Logging what chemicals you have on site, documenting where they are located, and ensuring up-to-date safety data sheets (SDSs) are available will help your business establish a solid baseline for creating chemical approval and control procedures, meet SDS compliance, and au- tomate regulatory reporting that is efficient and accurate, she added.
Among her top tips for creating an inventory are to: label materials; create chemical “areas,” either physically or logi- cally grouping materials; and to develop a routine schedule so the inventory process becomes an annual event. “By employing the right mix of people, process, and tech- nology, you can get a step ahead in your chemical management efforts and ensure compliance,” Williams said.
Using Chemical
Management Software
Chemical managers are beginning to re- alize that the most important investment their business will make in the next 10 years is information management software to make life easier, especially technology that integrates wider environmental health and safety data. Software platforms offer a straightforward data interface and report- ing function that can access data from a number of sources, fulfilling regulatory demands and supporting business analysis. A fully filterable and searchable inventory of materials can be backed up with com- prehensive digitized content provided by third parties, so you get the manufacturers’ details and hazard classifications that you’ll need for compliance reporting. Users also have the ability to register new chemicals associated with a particular product, and they can even request waivers if chemicals contain any Cat 1a substances.
To help build out a picture of potential risks or hazards, site managers can create property profiles for each individual site, noting which chemicals are where, how long they have been there, and whether there is a storage threshold per hazard type. Then there’s the option to create charts and graphs to help analyze chemi- cal inventory metrics.
Philips, the Amsterdam-based technol- ogy company that manufactures a range of electronic equipment and lighting, has been making use of chemical management software for the last few years. Eliminat-
ing and minimizing its use of hazardous substances in its products and produc- tion processes has long been a priority for the business. It maintains a Regulated Substances List (RSL) for products that includes substances banned by law or by Philips, that need to be monitored due to regulatory requirements, or that Philips just wants to monitor. The RSL is some- thing it asks its suppliers to comply with, and it is updated regularly. It also contains a number of substances that Philips wants to phase out from a precautionary point of view, despite there being no regulatory requirement to do so, such as polyvinyl chloride, phthalates, and beryllium.
Perhaps the world will instead turn to greener chemistry for product compo- nents and production techniques in the future. According to a new study by the American Sustainable Business Council and the Green Chemistry & Commerce Council (GC3), it is a market set to jump from $11 billion in 2015 to nearly $100 billion by 20202 as companies grapple to build more-sustainable entities and de- risk their processes.
There is a growing realization that the cost of managing chemicals goes far beyond the price of materials. By adopting best practice and looking at the entire lifecycle of chemicals, more and more companies are looking to better integrate the chemical management process so that it can be used to gain strategic advantage in the market- place, boosting efficiency, improving site health and safety, mitigating corporate risk, and creating sustainable businesses for the long term.
Robert Polito is the Director of Business Development for cr360, part of the UL EHS Sustainability Team, a leading, global EHS & Sustainability Management Software company (www.ulehssustainability.com). cr360 provides enterprise-wide, web-based, EHS & Sustainability Management Soft- ware solutions. Polito earned his B.S. degree in civil engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.
REFERENCES
1. http://www.eco-business.com/news/ taiwanese-chemical-spill-thought-to-cause- mass-fish-die-off-in-vietnam/
2. https://www.greenbiz.com/article/ 100-billion-business-case-safer-chemistry
APRIL 2017 | Environmental Protection EP5