Page 26 - OHS, June 2023

IH: CHEMICAL SAFETY Seeing the Forest for the Trees Getting back to basics with chemical safety and industrial hygiene. BY KRISTI HAMES, CIH, CSP As EHS professionals mature throughout their careers, their scope of responsibilities inevitably expands from one heavily focused on compliance and basic EHS management tasks to include best practices, EHS management systems, ESG, Total Worker Health and even managing and directing their own team of junior EHS professionals, just to name a few. Throughout my own career, I’ve observed instances where EHS leaders became so laser-focused on the big picture that the “basics” tended to be taken for granted or even neglected. Without a solid foundation of health and safety basics, an employer can have the best-looking management system, but if you aren’t able to “walk the walk” when it comes to EHS basics, any system you have in place is nothing more than a house of cards. An Industrial Hygienist’s Point-of-View As an industrial hygienist who’s spent most of her career in the chemical industry, many of the experiences that have stuck with me naturally revolve around industrial hygiene (IH) basics— chemical safety and hazard communication, exposure assessment, ventilation system design and, of course, PPE. One experience I have reflected on many times was at a facility that cleaned equipment for clients in the semiconductor industry. The individual responsible for evaluating EHS risks (a.k.a. the basics) for the facility was a senior environmental engineer who had spent a decade developing and implementing management systems for multiple organizations. While he did a phenomenal job coordinating the management system at a high level, there were significant gaps at the ground level, especially when it came to EHS basics. While this person was well aware of the parts cleaning operations, he did not recognize the hazards of the inorganic arsenic (a chemical used in semiconductor manufacturing) that the workers were cleaning off of the parts. Inorganic arsenic causes adverse health effects to numerous human target organs, and the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have classified it as a known carcinogen. In addition, nobody in leadership at the site was aware that OSHA substance-specific standards for inorganic arsenic applied to them. Chemical Hazards: Back to Basics With intensive expertise in chemistry, biology, toxicology, 24 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2023 www.ohsonline.com