Lab Safety & Chemical Hygiene Policy

PURPOSE

The principle purpose of this Chemical Hygiene Plan (CHP) is to define work policies and procedures to help ensure that laboratory employees at Calvin Univerysity will work safely with hazardous chemicals.

SCOPE

For the purposes of this plan, “laboratory employees” are those who ordinarily work full-time in a laboratory space. The CHP is also intended to ensure that a safe laboratory environment is in place for temporary or visiting personnel such as part-time students, visiting scholars,Also included are and office, custodial, maintenance, and repair personnel who, as part of their duties, regularly spend a significant amount of time within a laboratory environment.

The CHP does not apply to all places where hazardous chemicals are used. Only laboratories meeting the following four criteria are subject to the plan:

• Chemical manipulations are carried out on a laboratory scale. That is, the work with chemicals is in containers of a size that could be easily and safely manipulated by one person, rather than a manufacturing plant scale.
• Multiple chemical procedures or chemicals are used.
• The procedures involved are not part of a production process whose function is to produce commercial quantities of materials, nor do the procedures in any way simulate a production process.
• Protective laboratory practices and equipment are available and in common use to minimize the potential for employee exposure to hazardous chemicals.

The wording of these criteria are specifically intended to differentiate between laboratories like the research labs at Calvin Univerysity and laboratories that are devoted to a manufacturing process, which are covered under other regulations.