Recording a safety data sheet

Purpose

To hold, for every substance on the shelf, the document that says what it is and what it does to you — identified well enough that a claim on a course page can be checked against your own material a year from now.

When to use it

When a substance arrives. Again when you reorder from a different supplier, when a product’s packaging changes, and when a page in this course states a classification you did not expect.

This procedure records a sheet. Reading one — the sixteen sections, the pictograms, the H and P statements, what a classification means and how it moves with concentration — is taught by reading a safety data sheet, and is assumed here.

Before you start

You should already be able to find sections 2, 4, 7, 8, 10 and 13 of a sheet without hunting, and to read a CAS number as the field that survives a change of supplier or spelling.

On the bench: the container, with its own supplier label; the chemical inventory; a folder — on paper or on disc — where sheets live under names that sort; and the label stock, because the last step of this procedure writes onto a label.

Procedure

1. Get the sheet from the supplier who sold you this container, not from a search result for the substance. A sheet is written about a product as that supplier sells it.
2. Check the identity before you read anything else: the CAS number, and the form or hydrate. A sheet for the anhydrous salt is not a sheet for the pentahydrate.
3. Read section 2 for the classification, the signal word and the hazard statements; section 4 for first aid; section 7 for handling and storage; section 8 for exposure controls and personal protection; section 10 for stability and incompatibility; and section 13 for disposal considerations.
4. Record the six fields: product name exactly as printed; supplier, and the manufacturer if they differ; document version or reference, from section 1 or the footer; revision date, from section 16; the date you read it; and where the file is.
5. Cross-check the classification against an aggregation such as the ECHA inventory reproduced on PubChem, and note any disagreement in the inventory line rather than resolving it silently. Two sources differing is information about how firmly the substance is classified.
6. Save the file itself, dated, in the folder. A dated file beats a link, which will rot.
7. Copy the hazard wording and the signal word from this sheet onto the container’s label and onto the label of anything you decant from it, by labelling a container.
8. Take section 10’s incompatibilities to the shelf and check the container is not standing beside something on that list — the incompatibility matrix is where the course’s own pairs and their reactions live.
9. Take section 8’s glove and eye recommendations to the glove page before you buy anything, and record which glove you actually hold.
10. Write section 13 into the inventory line as what the sheet says, and read the disposal caveat before acting on it: the chemistry is general, the law is local, it changes, and you must check your local regulations.
11. Enter the line in the inventory by recording a batch.

How you know it worked

• The sheet on file names the product on your shelf, at the form and hydrate you hold, with a version and a revision date.
• The date you read it is recorded, and is not the same field as the date the sheet was revised.
• The container’s label now carries hazard wording that came from that document rather than from memory.
• The inventory line and the sheet agree on the CAS number.

If a step fails

Step 1, the supplier has no sheet and will not produce one. That is a finding about the supplier. A supplier of hazardous chemicals who cannot produce a sheet on request has told you something to act on; the manufacturers of photographic chemistry publish theirs openly. Prefer a supplier who does.

Step 2, the sheet’s CAS number does not match the container. Do not use the sheet. You have a document about a different substance, and a first-aid section for the wrong material is worse than none. Go back to step 1.

Step 2, the sheet does not state a hydrate and the label does not either. Record the ambiguity in the inventory, treat the material as unidentified for any formula where the hydrate changes the mass, and settle it by the CAS number if the supplier will confirm one.

Step 3, a section is empty or says “no data available”. Record that it was empty. Silence in section 8 is a statement about the handling the sheet assessed, not a statement about the substance in every situation — grinding it, heating it or spilling five litres of it are outside what was assessed.

Step 5, the sheet and the aggregation disagree. Record both, and work to the stricter of the two until you have a reason not to. This course does not resolve a disagreement between a supplier’s sheet and a notified classification by picking the more convenient one.

Step 7, the container is nearly empty and you would rather not relabel it. Then it is a candidate for retirement rather than for relabelling. Take it to the stock check and decide honestly.

What to record

One line in the inventory, carrying the six fields from step 4 plus the CAS number, the form or hydrate, and a note of any disagreement found at step 5. The sheet itself, dated, in the folder. And the hazard wording on the label, which is the only one of the three that is in the room when something goes wrong.