Chemical safety data in safety data sheets
What is a safety data sheet?
A safety data sheet (also known as material safety data sheet, MSDS data sheet) provides users with information on the physical, chemical and physiological effects of chemicals and hazardous substances, as well as on the safe use, storage and safe handling of residues. Its detailed content and structure requirements are set out in Annex II of the REACH Regulation.
What are the practical steps to be done with MSDS datasheets?
Users are obliged to obtain safety data sheets from their suppliers, who are obliged to make them available to their customers free of charge. Distributors of hazardous chemicals typically provide safety data sheets for their products on their websites in the form of Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files.On the one hand, employers are obliged to disseminate the chemical safety data contained in MSDS data sheets to their employees, and on the other hand, employers are obliged to carry out a chemical risk analysis for each workplace based on the data stored in the safety data sheets. To do this, they need to extract data (e.g. exposure limit values, H and P phrases, physical state, etc.) scattered from MSDS sheets.
It gives special relevance to the issue that After 1 January 2023, the safety data sheets of all products on the market must comply with Regulation 2020/878, i.e. all MSDS data sheets had to be updated by 31 December 2022 due to the need to include two new chapters for distributors. This means that users must review and update all listings they have.
Practical problems using data stored in safety data sheets
In practice, the obligations outlined for users of hazardous chemicals mean working with a huge amount of documents and extracted data for OSH managers in organizations. Depending on their field of activity, production and service organizations use between 15 and hundreds of different hazardous chemicals, and they must obtain and update an appropriate amount of safety data sheets and make their contents available to their employees. Extracting data from MSDS data sheets in non-writable format causes a lot of mechanical work and the possibility of errors.Service for the digital management of data contained in safety data sheets
Safetinfo Solutions Ltd. offers a solution for quick listing, filtering and sorting of safety data sheets; for example, on the basis of their validity, date of issue or revision, language, carcinogenicity or toxicity for reproduction of substances, obligation of biological monitoring, etc.On the other hand, we collect chemical safety data from MSDS data sheets to carry out chemical risk assessments. Examples of such data include
- State of matter
- H and P phrases for precautions for ingredients,
- Materials incompatible with the material,
- Shipping information,
- Necessary personal protective equipment,
- Storage conditions to avoid,
- Composition and ingredient information,
- Exposure limit values.
We provide assistance in carrying out chemical risk assessments by searching the components of the hazardous chemicals in Annex VI of the CLP Regulation on the Classification and Labeling of Hazardous Chemical Substances. If the substance contains an ingredient that is on the current list of the CLP regulation, then its data is copied from CLP Annex VI and placed on the worksheet of the data sheet.
The second version (V2) of the Safetinfo service uses artificial intelligence (OpenAI) for the treatment of text information exported from data sheets ( e.g. personal protective equipment, composition and compositional information, etc.) performs a spell check and preserves the structure of the text to make it easy for the user to highlight the data. This version organizes the exported data differently compared to the previous version, V1.
We can see examples of both.