Should Your Chemical Hygiene Plan Lose Weight?

Should Your Chemical Hygiene Plan Lose Weight?

As the years went by, what started as a skinny 25-40 page document has gradually bloated to over 150 pages before anyone realized it. Let's face it: your chemical hygiene plan (CHP) is overweight. And the problem isn't just cosmetic. When many people see a policy...

Chemical Companies Operating Under the Radar

Chemical Companies Operating Under the Radar

Photo: Associated Press On March 15, an explosion at a Tri-Chem Industries chemical plant in Cresson, Texas left one person dead and two injured. Days later, hazardous chemicals were still burning. What chemicals exactly have burned into the air since the explosion?...

How Do You Convince People to Care?

How Do You Convince People to Care?

Apparently, not dying isn't enough to convince people to care about their own safety. Believe me, it's not. For 40 years, I've been trying. Still, in every country, in every lab I visit, I find health and safety personnel struggling with the same question: How do you...

Marie Curie: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Marie Curie: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Marie Curie is famous for her ground-breaking work on radioactivity, which is also what killed her. Curie died of aplastic anemia, believed to be caused by prolonged exposure to radiation. Usually, we write it off as "back then, nobody understood the dangers of...

Make America’s Classrooms and Workplaces Safe Again

Make America’s Classrooms and Workplaces Safe Again

It happened again. A dozen kids sat on the floor in a Texas church school recently, watching a teacher show them a "fun" science experiment. The teacher took some boric acid, put it in a beaker, then poured in methanol from a jug. A swirling rainbow-like flame jumped...

National Academic Research Safety Award – Summer 2014

The Laboratory Safety Institute has created a national safety award for the Academic Principal Investigator whose research group has the best lab safety program. We are asking Environmental Health and Safety departments at universities to nominate the PI at their...

Four Cities in China – May 2014

In May, Agilent Technologies invited LSI to make two-hour lab safety presentations in China. We visited four cities, Tianjin, Huizhou, Nanjing, and Shanghai. About four hundred lab workers and supervisors from medical, forensic, petroleum, industry and government...