By Diane Colabello, Senior Health & Safety Specialist
Following chemical safety best practices can have beneficial impacts that reach beyond the immediate laboratory. Here, we explore how the simple act of maintaining an accurate chemical inventory can improve lab safety and affect new initiatives, including WCM Facilities Management & Campus Operations Department’s air quality and sustainability project in the Belfer Research Building (BRB).
Proper inventory management leads to a safer lab environment. At WCM, chemical inventories are maintained in Salute, which ties each entry to a safety data sheet in the Chemwatch database. This provides researchers with quick access to safety information for planning experiments or responding to an unexpected event such as a spill or exposure. Salute also assigns a storage group to each chemical, helping the lab to implement safe storage and segregation practices. Beyond that, EHS uses the reported chemical inventories to help labs target high-hazard substances, develop operating procedures, and report inventories to agencies involved in emergency response planning, such as the DEP and FDNY.
Moving forward, chemical inventories in the Belfer Research Building will become a key component for balancing safety, air quality, and sustainability. A previous EHS newsletter article, Safety Meets Sustainability, highlighted the benefits of the Aircuity system, which at that time was being piloted on just a single floor of the BRB, but will now be expanded throughout most of the building. The project will see sensors installed later this year to monitor and maintain air quality (e.g., carbon dioxide, particulates, temperature, TVOCs) while reducing the number of air changes per hour (ACH) and overall energy consumption required of the building. Continuous monitoring means that Aircuity can adjust ACH to respond to changes in any one of the measured parameters.
The Salute chemical inventories provided to the project were used in calculations to set the new minimum ACH of a typical lab from 6-10 ACH to 2-4 ACH and to justify the safety of these changes to regulatory agencies, including the FDNY. ACH calculations based on chemical inventories can be run periodically or when major changes to the inventory in a lab space occur (e.g., a lab move or lab renovation). Laboratories in BRB will play an important role in this project by maintaining an accurate chemical inventory and updating the location of the chemical bottles in the Salute inventory record as necessary. The EHS Update, Salute: Chemical Inventory System, is a great resource for new and existing researchers to keep their inventories up to date and participate in creating a safer, more sustainable campus.