The sustained production and use of chemicals is vital to economic growth. Globally, the chemical industry accounts for more than $1.7 trillion per year business and affects many other related and ancillary industries. In the US, the chemical industry accounts for more than $450 billion in business, with exports surpassing $80 billion annually.1
Occupational regulations require that workers, including public employees and emergency responders, be made aware of the hazards associated with various chemicals that they may handle or become exposed. An employer and or host employer must effectively train and communicate the physical and health - hazards associated with respective chemicals in the workplace. Through the regulatory "right to know" training obligations, an employer must "effectively" organize and communicate essential information on the hazardous chemicals and provide appropriate control measures. This "right to know" has evolved further to a "right to understand," where the Understanding of the nature and degree of chemical hazards inside of a worker's working environment leads to more effective and practical control measures, which deter and lessen the likelihood of exposure.
Three elements of the revised Global Harmonization System (GHS) include (1) signal words (2) pictograms and (3) safety data sheets:
Signal words of either WARNING or DANGER must appear on primary container labels. These terms are not interchangeable. DANGER identifies chemicals that present a relatively greater or more immediate hazard to the worker as opposed to WARNING which identifies a lesser degree of hazard.
The Hazard Communication Standard (HCS) requires pictograms. The pictogram is determined by the chemical hazard classification.
Workers are required to have access to the Safety Data Sheet (SDS) for the hazardous materials they work with at their site. Prior to the enactment of the GHS, there was no standard format for presenting information on the SDS. Common formats included an eight section document or the sixteen section American National Standards Institute (ANSI) format.2 Additionally, the word material is removed from its name and all hazard sheets are referred to as Safety Data Sheets (SDS).
