Chemical Safety, and Compliance in Manufacturing

Posted on 20th April 2020

Is your business in the manufacturing industry? If yes, then you need to learn about the COSHH regulations?

What is COSHH? COSHH stands for Control of Substances Hazardous to Health. Furthermore, COSHH is a law that instructs employers on how to handle substances that are hazardous to the health of their employees. COSHH helps employers to identify ways to prevent employee contact with substances. Also, it gives the employers questions to answer about their workplace. For example:

What are the health hazards?
How do you prevent them from harming the health of your employees?
What preventative measure do you plan on implementing?
COSHH will ensure that employers train their employees on how to safely handle chemicals. However, COSHH does not only cover chemicals. COSHH also covers dust, vapours, mist and fumes. All of these substances can harm the health of exposed workers.

Employees and employers must ensure they always wear suitable personal protective equipment (PPE).

Also, employers must perform a COSHH assessment. The COSHH assessment identifies the risk of exposure to hazardous substances. This not only includes substances which COSHH covers but also their biproducts. For example, welding fumes, dust from quarrying and construction and gases from silage.

This procedure along with the accident book, which shows any areas of concern and for them to fix, to avoid it from happening in the future.

How should COSHH chemicals be stored?

It is important that you store your substances safely. You must store different chemicals in different ways. Places such as schools, laboratories, hospitals and factories have COSHH cabinets. These COSHH cabinets usually store cleaning and hazardous substances.

Storing certain chemicals together can be dangerous. When some chemicals mix, they create a chemical reaction that produces toxic gases. These gases can cause serious illness and even death when inhaled.

You must store flammable materials in the correct storage cabinet. Or store them in facilities fitted with sprinkler systems. Furthermore, the surrounding are should be clear of open flames, smoking shelters and sparks. This would help minimise the risk of accidentally igniting materials.

Also, you need to store corrosive chemicals in specialist storage facilities. The tanks and containers that the chemicals are stored in, must be routinely inspected to make sure that they haven’t been compromised by leaks and corrosion.

With most chemicals and hazardous materials, the area that they are stored in needs to be well ventilated. If there was ever a leak or spillage in the facility, then the air inside would be contaminated by the hazardous substance. Good ventilation means that there is a way of reducing the concentration of hazardous substances in the air.

How Parsons Can Help

At Parsons, we can help employers to safely store hazardous substances in a way that complies with COSHH guidelines. We create bespoke containers and storage vessels that can improve your workplace safety. Also, we manufacture all our equipment to customer requirement with a range of different capacities.