In the United States, the Occupation Safety and Heath Administration (OSHA) was created in 1970. The goal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) was to ensure that, "No employee will suffer material impairment of health or functional capacity," from a lifetime of exposure to chemicals at work. OSHA promulgated the Hazard Communication Standard in the United States, based on itsnclusion that employees have a right to know about the hazards of chemicals that they were being exposed to. It was hoped that appropriately trained employees could learn to protect themselves from hazardous chemicals, using Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
In order to meet the goal of better educating employees, technical personnel are responsible for drafting Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs. Unfortunately, the MSDSs leave much to be desired. The warnings are chemical-specific but not process-specific. Due to a lack of standardization in the United States, conventional MSDSs often contain redundant and/or conflicting information, which may obscure, impede or otherwise interfere with a rapid and accurate assessment of a hazard. Most troubling, MSDSs are technically derived and usually difficult for their intended audiences to read and interpret. This problem is compounded by the lack of standardization, which allows importers to distribute foreign MSDSs that use the Metric System, other symbols and/or pictograms that are not generally well understood by the employees.
Presently, there are over 70 million MSDSs in 28,000 formats in the United States. In addition, according to most studies, at least 30% of the MSDSs contain inaccurate or insufficient data. One major flaw of the Hazard Communication Standard is to equate hazard information on the raw materials with employee protection during the processing of chemicals during the production.
In the United Kingdom, Health and Safety Executive (HSE) created the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations (COSHH Essentials). The intent was to provide simple and practical guidance on how to prevent and reduce the risks from chemicals at work. COSHH Essentials is a control-banding tool for risk assessment of chemicals and mixtures of chemicals. The concept of Control Banding first originated in the pharmaceutical industry, which uses many exotic chemicals that have not been tested adequately for their toxic potentials. An effort was made to classify chemicals into bands by their toxicity. Each band was assigned a control scheme to restrict exposure. In British Law, the employer has the duty to control risk and no chemical operation can be performed without a formal risk assessment of the process. Chemical Data Sheets are used to provide some of the information in the risk assessment process, especially regarding the likelihood of the chemical entering the atmosphere due to its inherent volatility or dustiness and other important hazard information from EU Risk and Safety Statements.
Very similar to the COSHH Essential concept of Control Banding is a Scheme for Workplace Chemicals Control Kit, which uses generic risk assessment, based on the Global Harmonization System (GHS) and task guidance sheets.
