Category: Chemicals

Today’s workplace uses thousands of chemicals, many of which are hazardous. The resources in this section will help guide you in the safe and legal identification, storage, transport, and use of these chemicals, and in making sure that your employees right to know how to be safe around such substances is provided, as required by law.

Cathodic Protection Maintenance and Testing Tips

Cathodic Protection Cathodic protection uses direct electrical current to mitigate corrosion. There are two types of systems for cathodic protection: Sacrificial anodes, which can be attached to a coated steel UST for corrosion protection. Sacrificial anodes are pieces of metal more electrically active than the steel UST. Because these anodes are more active, the corrosive current […]

The Silent Equipment Killer

What ASTSWMO UST Task Force Found The ASTSWMO UST Task Force solicited information for fiscal year 2012 from all 50 states, five territories, and the District of Columbia in an effort to determine the violations most often encountered during UST compliance inspections. Responses were received from 35 states and territories, covering nearly 59,000 UST inspections […]

Do Your Workers Know These Important Asbestos Safety Rules?

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have adopted regulations to protect workers from exposure to asbestos-containing materials, asbestos-containing building materials, and presumed asbestos-containing materials (PACMs). An Operations and Maintenance (O&M) program is a formulated plan of training, cleaning, work practices, and surveillance to maintain the ACM in […]

Seven Tips to Make Sure Your Asbestos is Adequately Wet

Acronyms and Definitions Before we list the tips, let’s take a minute to define some asbestos terms that are applicable in demolition/renovation projects. ACM—asbestos-containing material, i.e., any material that contains more than 1% asbestos. Sometimes it is best to leave ACM in place. ACWM—asbestos-containing waste material, i.e., waste that contains commercial asbestos and is generated […]

9 Tips to Prevent Ruptures from Liquid ASTs

  Why You Have to Worry About Every AST Just a note before getting into preventing ruptures. Even if some of your ASTs do not contain a hazardous or regulated substance, their failure could damage nearby tanks that do contain hazardous substances and cause releases. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can cite a number […]

16 Tips for Inspecting Your Aboveground Storage Tank

ASTs are storage tanks that are aboveground, regardless of whether they are used to store petroleum products, hazardous waste, or other hazardous material. There are a variety of overlapping federal laws and regulations that govern ASTs, and most are highly regulated on the state and local level. There are specific inspection requirements for hazardous waste […]

Why Is There So Much Confusion About TSCA 8(e) Reporting?

EAB Throws Out Huge TSCA Penalty Earlier this year, EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) reversed a $2.5 million penalty against Elementis Chromium, Inc. for the company’s failure to report under TSCA Section 8(e) information contained in an occupational epidemiology study on hexavalent chromium. The study showed that occupational exposure to hexavalent chromium is associated with […]

Nanomaterials and TSCA—It’s the Little Things

What are nanoscale materials? Nanomaterials are chemical substances that have structures with dimensions at the nanoscale—approximately 1 to 100 nanometers (nm). To get an idea of their size, a human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nm wide. The thinking is that nanomaterials may have properties different from the same chemical substances with structures at […]

8 Tips for Reporting Your P2 Activities

While it is our contention that in this day and age most facilities are engaged in some sort of P2 to reduce chemical use and waste production, as we reported in yesterday’s Advisor, only 16% of all TRI facilities reported their P2 activities for reporting year 2013. The EPA would like to up that percentage […]

How to Use the TRI P2 Search Tool

Who Has to File a TRI Report? Facilities in different industry sectors, facilities in Indian country, and federal facilities must annually report how much of each toxic chemical they managed through recycling, energy recovery, treatment, and environmental releases. Either a facility’s owner or operator may file the TRI report, but both will be held responsible […]