Visual Chemical Safety: What Am I Trying To Say?
How can a picture communicate hazards and personal protection?
I like to use examples from the consumer side of things. All os us probably use cleaning and other chemicals that would be nearly as hazardous as anything we would encounter at work.
Plus this lets workers take the information home to their families, which can help keep them safer.
What did you take this sequence of pictures to mean? Here’s what I hope you got from it:
For the product The Works Toilet Bowl Cleaner (the same size and concentration you would find at your local Big Box store”
With respect to Skin Exposure (more understandable to a non-technical audience than the term Dermal)
The hazard to your skin is Moderate
Wear Nitrile Gloves (the blue ones that look like the picture)
That come in a box that looks like this
Ideally the next picture would show where the worker would get the gloves.
And ideally the gloves in the box would match the color of the gloves in the picture (the picture shows blue gloves, the box shows black ones)
Background:
Remember, the goal of Visual Chemical Safety is to convey the hazards associated with working with a chemical and how a worker can safetly work with that chemical to a worker where:
English is not their native language (or their native language is not the same as the document)
The worker doesn’t read or doesn’t read well
The worker has cognitive or other learning challenges
Over the next couple of days I’ll work through a synthesis of the presentations I did at the CSHEMA (pronounced SHEEMA, I was pronouncing it wrong) annual conference in Phoenix July 9-13, 2022.
The examples, while each will be stand-alone, will build on each other.
The following example is for one route of exposure. Then we’ll add first aid for that route. Then add another route. And so on.
Then we’ll address how to automate the creation of these from the Safety Data Sheet.
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Community Outreach: What would you do differently?
More next time…
