Chemical safety

Chemical safety is the practice of handling chemicals in a safe manner, minimizing the hazard to public and personal health.

Principles

Chemical safety is the practice of minimizing risk of exposure to chemicals to persons handling the chemicals, and to the surrounding environment, as well as the communities and ecosystems of animals within that environment. Numerous incidents have occurred, from minor ones such as the oil accident in Mexico,[1] killing 24 people, to major ones such as Chernobyl and the Deepwater Horizon Spill, devastating huge areas of land and affecting thousands of lives. Chemical Safety is implemented in every facility dealing with potentially harmful substances to the environment, and can be found in detail on the United States CDC website, with a database that lists all industry safety practices managing chemicals and other harmful substances.[2]

Common Safety Practices

Many of the most basic and common chemical safety practices include minor things such as wearing safety standard gloves, or proper headwear like goggles or other equipment. But extend to a very large amount of industry specific practices, especially when handling severely corrosive and basic solutions that can cause great harm to biological life. These include Respirators,[3] to maintain a safe breathing space when handling harmful chemicals, as well as hearing protection like muffs to reduce hearing damage when handling loud machinery. All of these are important to maintain the health and safety of individual employees, but also of the surrounding environment as these precautions ensure that employees can do their jobs properly and prevent accidents from occurring.

Accidents

Accidents occur due to failures in proper conduct of chemical safety, whether it be something minor such as forgetting to apply gloves or proper clothing when handling harmful chemicals, to major incidents such as forgetting to check the temperatures of nuclear rods in a nuclear reactor. Major look-by's such as the one previously stated generally lead to the more famous chemical safety disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, where these major catastrophes could have been avoided, but ended up affecting large areas of the environment, and will be this way for hundreds of years.[4]

See also

References
  1. "Chemical accident kills 24 in Mexico". Chemical & Engineering News. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  2. "Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances | NIOSH | CDC". www.cdc.gov. 2020-02-21. Retrieved 2020-11-25.
  3. "Chemical Safety Information | Office of Environmental Health and Safety". ehs.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  4. "NRC: Backgrounder on Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Accident". www.nrc.gov. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
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