Capturing Health & Safety

In organic synthetic reactions, chemists often have to use hazardous reagents that may be toxic, lachrymatory, pyrophoric or potentially explosive. Such reagents need to be treated with caution, and the chemist is obliged to complete a risk assessment before being able to use them. The laws around Health & Safety regulations differ around the world, but there is an overall increase in legislation and a growing need to document risks.

Legacy risk and safety classifications such as CLP or OSHA have been replaced by the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) which relates to the classification of the hazard, prevention, response and storage of chemicals.

Within the E-WorkBook Chemistry web notebook, users can easily select the personal protection equipment (PPE) and also the overall risk categories for the reaction. Of course, each chemical component in the reaction has its own set of GHS safety codes, which can be referenced from supplier product labels or material safety data sheets (MSDS). We have made it easy for chemists to add individual codes for each component and be able to view a summary of the risk assessment with relevant icons.

By framing it within a clean and intuitive interface, it fits easily into a chemist’s workflow, and helps to remove the burden of completing a risk assessment before performing a reaction.