The Vision

Global Vision of Chemical Safety

What part of it will you build?

The Vision

What if every chemical got a “smart label” put on it or tagged to it at the time of its manufacture? And what if that information also got loaded up into the Cloud and followed the chemical wherever it went on its journey across the supply chain?

We don’t know what that Smart Label looks like, but we do know that most of the technology it uses probably already exists, like the components of the first iPhone already existed.

Explosion in Tianjin, China

And what if part of the smart label was that it had a GPS in it, and as it crossed regulatory or geographic jurisdictions the visible content of the label changed to meet the new requirements and potentially new language? How much time might that save on the part of environmental professionals? (Or how much safer might everyone be if the information was available without any effort on the part of their company, since it always takes less time and money to do nothing than to do something?)  How much safer might workers in the new geography be if the process used Artificial Intelligence to be automatically generate safety information and warnings?

And what if “smart” Safety Glasses or a smart visual device such as Google Glass or Microsoft Hololens could display the hazards associated with a chemical as a hologram appearing above the chemical container, such as a flame sized to the relative flammability hazard of the chemical? Based on industry standards such as the US Department of Transportation Hazard Classes and UN Global Harmonization System pictograms of hazards? And what if those visual devices could translate to the user’s native language, and even narrate in the native tongue specific to that set of glasses for the literacy challenged?

And what if the containers of chemicals had awareness of other chemicals around them, and could warn operators and others when incompatible materials are too close or when unsafe quantities are being accumulated? This might have prevented the disastrous Port of China explosion in Tienjen in August 2015 which killed 173, many of whom were firefighters untrained in hazardous materials, and which injured hundreds.

And what if intrinsically safe devices were available so that all operational information could be beamed up to the cloud without requiring an additional, manual step of transcribing from paper to electrons (or not transcribing and losing the readily searchable knowledge, since doing nothing is always less work than doing something)? How much more information could be available and what are all the valuable uses that could be made of that?

And what if use-specific “templatized” Safe Use Instructions could be provided to demystify chemical safety for all who encounter the chemical, whether industrial workers or consumers? How much work could be avoided and how much safer would workers and consumers be?

And what if Emergency Responders could tap into the Cloud data and all these capabilities after a natural disaster such as Katrina?

More later, here’s to better Visual Chemical Safety and a Connected Chemical Supply Chain