What’s the “Mom and Apple Pie” around chemical safety for your workers?

What’s the same, what’s different?

Today we’ll focus on the “what’s the same”part of your training.

“Don’t eat it, don’t drink it, don’t unnecessarily expose yourself to it”.

That’s how my favorite Industrial Hygienist described the “Mom and Apple Pie” of chemical safety for workers.

(He’s retired now, he would actually “make the call” about what was required for different chemicals. I still remember him reviewing the 3 (M)SDS’s for Brake Fluid that had been received. “These 2 are ok. This third one has constituent that has been implicated in testicular cancer, we won’t approve that one”.

Above: Zingerman’s BAKE! “Pies a Plenty” class, Amy Emberling Managing Partner on right. Top: Zingerman’s Bakehouse shop, Rustic Apple Pie, Zingerman’s Deli “Breadbox”, Jaison Restrick, new managing partner Zingerman’s Bakehouse

So what are the Mom and Apple Pie components of your Visual Chemical Safety program?

These are the non-negotiables.

You train these as if they were one item.

You take compliance with these as a matter of course, as a “given”.

A few questions to ask around this with respect to your Safety program:

• What are they for what roles?

• How do we train workers about them?

• How do we model them? What is our culture around them?

• How do we make compliance as close to automatic as we can?

• What consequences do we define for non-compliance?

Training becomes an interesting question. What do we as EHS professionals assume that workers understand about chemical safety that they might not? For example, how many understand that ingestion can occur from poor chemical hygiene and how best to share that with them?

(My favorite for this is the “Gloves and Shaving Cream” exercise, attendees put on gloves, you put a dab of shaving cream in the glove, they make “hand washing” motions to spread the shaving cream around, then you teach them how to remove the gloves without getting shaving cream on their hands. Gets trainees up and moving, and once they’ve done it, unlikely they will forget it.

The last one is the difficult one. Without it, the rest is pretty toothless..

Community Outreach: What are YOUR answers to the above questions? What are the best practices you’ve seen? Where have you seen programs fail?

More next time…