About This Course and the Laboratory Standard

This course explains the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard Occupational exposure to hazardous chemicals in laboratories, found at 29 CFR 1910.1450 and usually called the Laboratory Standard. It is written for laboratory managers, chemical hygiene officers, principal investigators, laboratory workers and environment, health and safety (EHS) staff.

It is an intermediate course. It expects you to know what a safety data sheet and a hazard label are, and it focuses on applying the standard: building and checking a Chemical Hygiene Plan (CHP), choosing controls, and handling the situations where laboratories most often go wrong.

Why laboratories have their own standard

Most OSHA chemical rules in Subpart Z of 29 CFR 1910 were written for industrial work: one substance, used in large amounts, in a repeated process. A laboratory is different. A single chemist may use dozens of chemicals in a week, in small amounts, in procedures that change all the time. Rules written for a production line fit that work badly.

OSHA issued the Laboratory Standard in 1990 to deal with this. Instead of a detailed rule for each substance, it asks the employer to write a performance-based plan, the CHP, that is capable of protecting workers from the hazardous chemicals actually used in that laboratory and of keeping exposures below OSHA's permissible exposure limits (PELs).

How the course is built

Module 1 sets out the scope and the people involved. Module 2 is the CHP itself. Modules 3 and 4 cover hazard information, training, exposure monitoring, medical attention and particularly hazardous substances. Modules 5 and 6 are the practical controls: fume hoods, protective equipment, emergency eyewash, storage, incompatibles, flammables, peroxide formers, gases and cryogens. Module 7 covers emergencies, waste, records and a full review of a sample CHP.

Hazard classification, labels and safety data sheets are taught in detail in the Hazard Communication and GHS (OSHA HCS) course, and only recapped here.