CLEAPSS Hazcards and your chemical store

Job one: record what you actually hold

A Hazcard describes a chemical. It knows nothing about your bottle. Your own record has to say that this particular container exists, how much is in it, how old it is and where it is kept.

The Department for Education says it is essential to keep an up-to-date inventory of hazardous chemicals. It adds that the fire service will need to see that inventory in the event of a fire. Reading the card for sodium will not tell a fire officer that you hold a jar in cabinet four.

Add the Hazcard number to each line of your register as a reference. It takes seconds, and anyone covering your absence can reach the right card straight away. Record the date you last checked the card as well, as guidance is revised over time. An old printout in a ring binder may no longer be the current version, so check your copy against the source rather than assuming.

Job two: turn a card into a storage plan

A card can tell you how a chemical should be stored. It cannot lay out a room that has one flammables cabinet, one ventilated cupboard and a shelf above a radiator.

This is the point at which reference material becomes a technician's judgement. List your storage classes and then count the shelf space you have for each. Most stores reveal the same pressure points: too many flammables for the cabinet, oxidisers sharing space with organic stock because that is where the room was, and acids stored where the fumes attack the metal shelving and every cap nearby. The solution usually starts with reducing stock, not buying furniture.

Compatibility needs checking in both directions. Each bottle may be stored correctly according to its own card, and still sit beside something it should never meet. Mercury in a thermometer box beside ammonia solution is one such pairing, and a card read in isolation will not flag your particular shelf. Walk the shelves with your list and ask what would happen if each bottle leaked onto its neighbour.

Then add the legal layer the card sits under. COSHH requires your employer to assess the risk and put controls in place. DSEAR covers the fire and explosion risks from dangerous substances. The advisory card informs both assessments and replaces neither. The same is true of a safety data sheet, which HSE is careful to say is not itself a risk assessment.

Job three: review what is on the shelf

A card describes a chemical as it should be. The bottle on your shelf has had twenty summers next to a radiator.

The Department for Education notes that some substances decay over time and can then present a hazard, and asks schools to audit stock regularly with routine surveillance. So you need a habit that sits outside the card:

• Date everything. Add a received date to each bottle, and an opened date once it has been used. Without them, you cannot judge age.
• Look on a schedule. Check labels, caps, levels and condition at least once a year, and look more often at items known to deteriorate.
• Note what has changed. Colour changes, crystals, swollen plastic, oil levels that have fallen and caps that have corroded all need recording.
• Ask the teaching question. If nobody has used a chemical in years, it has no reason to remain.

When the review turns up something that worries you, do not handle it to investigate. Dried picric acid, sodium that has lost its oil and old ethers are the familiar examples. Leave the item in place, keep people away and arrange a specialist assessment. If there is immediate danger, call 999.

Job four: plan the way out

Disposal is where technicians most often find a gap between advice and action. Advice can tell you a chemical needs specialist disposal. Nobody on the card can arrive with a vehicle, and the legal duties on waste are your school's own.

From the moment you decide to discard a bottle, it is waste, and a separate set of rules begins. You must classify it, keep it apart from other waste, pass it only to authorised businesses and keep the consignment note for three years in England. Your advisory service can guide you on setting this up. The Department for Education also recommends speaking to CLEAPSS when you are making or changing disposal arrangements. It warns too about firms operating illegally at discount prices, so checking a carrier's registration remains part of the job.

The advisory note on disposal for a class activity, and the legal route for a store clear-out, are also different things. Advice about managing the small residues from one lesson should not be read as covering a shelf of unwanted stock.

A simple way to keep the four jobs together

One register line per container can carry all of this.

The result is a document that does what no reference card sets out to do. It describes your store, today, in a form the next technician can use.

Getting a second opinion on the store

Your advisory service is the right first call for questions about a chemical or an activity. Sometimes a store also needs someone to stand in it. That usually happens after staff changes, when a building moves or when an inventory turns up items nobody can account for. A chemical store assessment is a specialist's visit for that purpose, covering legacy and unknown stock before anything is moved.