CoSHH Assessment Diary - Week 2 of 4 - Dealing With a Fresh List of Chemicals

In my CoSHH diary last week I explained my reasons for wishing to comply with the HSE " target="_self" CoSHH regulations. This week I have looked at my initial findings through my investigation of the chemicals my business is using and what the information of which we knew about them. My line managers delivered the information to my desk on Monday morning and we talked over our findings.

So what did I find out? Well I was shocked to find that of the fifty or so chemicals we had, we could only account for roughly thirty being used or identifiable. It was my suggestion that we should try to dispose of any of the chemicals we did not use or to try to recycle them elsewhere. The chemicals must be removed appropriately for which we would speak to the local council to start moving things forward. I asked for the name of the line manager and the chemical (if available) to be recorded for each and every disposal. My main purpose here was to ensure that if something was disposed of that we needed then I knew where to point the finger. This was a straight forward and reactive response which almost halved the amount of work we had to do and gave the additional benefit of opening up more space on our shop floor and in our storage bay areas.

I spent a good while on Tuesday reviewing the information on the chemicals. I decided to have a walk round the shop floor and speak with some of my staff. It occurred to me that if we could not account for the use of roughly fifty percent of our chemicals then it would be fair to say that we would have pretty limited knowledge of the one's that we did. Consider this a surprise inspection from a HSE health and safety inspector. I asked two simple questions of each of my staff, one - "do you know where the " target="_self" CoSHH assessment is for the chemical you are using?", and two - "do have a Safety Data Sheet for that?". Can you guess how many CoSHH assessments and Safety Data Sheets I saw? Zero. The exact type of person I would be made to feel like if I had been inspected for real. It's worth getting out of the office and taking a stroll around your workplace to see what you find. This task if nothing else confirmed the need for an overhaul of our health and safety policy and in particular our CoSHH compliance.

One of my more forward thinking line managers came to see me on Wednesday afternoon to say that he thought the chemical clearout was a great success. One of his team had come to see him and had said that some of the people in his team had been ordering different brands of the same chemical and that one type of chemical could be purchased at a reduced cost to do all of the activities. They even went as far as to find a more suitable non hazardous alternative. Well, immediately upon finding this information out a light bulb flicked on in my brain! Do you know what my thoughts were? Hopefully! I asked my line manager to do another job for me. This time, knowing that we had a good list of what we were using I wanted him to go through all the chemicals our business used and rationalise the list. His objective was to group all the chemicals that we used into their appropriate applications/uses and then look for the safest and economical alternative to cover the variety of applications.

It now made sense to wait for the results of these findings before producing any health and safety documentation as I did not want to create unnecessary work. In the meantime I decided to nominate my line managers for CIEH certification in the principles of risk assessment. I invited a training provider to give a one day group training session on Tuesday of next week. This would give me the confidence that my team would be able to sufficiently identify risks and adopt safer working practices.

My diary will continue next week with my way forward for investigating tasks and producing compliant CoSHH risk assessments.