Tag Archives: technical information

Safety Education

Organic Class Lab Safety Topics Survey results

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With the support of an ACS Innovative Project Grant, the ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety is partnering with the Division of Chemical Information and ACS Safety Advisory Panel to develop teaching resources to help students in undergraduate organic teaching labs develop hazard identification and risk assessment skills appropriate to their work in the lab. To help us with this work, we developed a survey about organic chemistry laboratory courses taught at the undergraduate level.

With the help of the DCHAS-L e-mail list, we were able to get thoughts from 63 people about the most important organic teaching laboratory exercises to consider in our work as well as some general information about safety practices they employ in this setting.

You can review the detailed results of this survey here:

Organic-Safety-Topics-SurveyDownload

We’d also appreciate it if you would share with us information about a question we forgot to ask in the first survey: What are your requirements for PPE in the organic teaching lab?

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If you would like to share any thoughts on this work, please send them to Ralph Stuart at membership@dchas.org

Reference material

Periodic Table of the elements of safety

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Note: the August, 2019 version of the Periodic Table of the Elements of Safety is available at https://dchas.org/2019/08/19/periodic-table-of-safety-elements-updated/

In celebration of the International Year of the Periodic Table, the Department of Environmental Health and Safety of Princeton University, led by Jim Sturdivant and Chelsea McDonnell (pictured above) and the ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety developed a “Periodic Table of the Elements of Safety” to share with the chemistry community.

We believe that this layout of key lab hazards and safety management techniques in a familiar Periodic Table format can be an important teaching and reference tool for people as they conduct hazard assessments in the laboratory. It provides an overview of many of the elements these assessments should consider in an “at a glance” format.

This table also recognizes the elements of a chemical laboratory safety culture by identifying key innovators, leaders and victims of laboratory chemistry work over the history of laboratory science. We believe that an ongoing reminder that laboratory safety is both a technical and cultural challenge supports a generative safety culture described in the National Academy of Sciences report on Safe Science.

You can download the periodic table itself in PDF format suitable for printing on 18″ x 24″ paper hereDownload
You can download an explanation of the various Safety Elements we chose to include hereDownload
You can download the periodic table itself in PDF format suitable for printing on 11″ x 17″ paper hereDownload

You can also explore the different sections of the table with this interactive “hot spot” graphic.

We realize that you may have questions, comments or ideas for improving our first version of this table. Please let us know what you think at membership@dchas.org