Chemistry: Safety

Promotes and facilitates safe practices in chemical activities by providing advice and counsel to ensure safety by calling attention to potential hazards and stimulating education in safe chemical practices. Here you will find publications, tips, and other information to improve safety in schools, the workplace, and beyond.

News, developments, and resources regarding chemical safety.

Safety resources from the American Chemical Society.

Accident prevention for college and university students. A freely available ebook from the American Chemical Society.

Accident prevention for faculty and administrators. A freely available ebook from the American Chemical Society.

A free ebook from the publisher John Wiley & Sons that gives an overview of important safety rules for chemical laboratories.

From the American Chemical Society, this guide will familiarize you with the fundamentals of hazard assessment; guide you through preparation practices such as scoping and assembling your team; offer a number of ways to conduct hazard assessments; provide tools (e.g., templates, examples, etc.) that can be shared with your team and used immediately.

Guidelines developed by the Hazards Identification and Evaluation Task Force of the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Chemical Safety

The National Library of Medicine's comprehensive portal with many links to sources, some of which are chemical & biological laboratory safety, handling reactive chemicals, nanomaterials, radiation safety, laboratory waste management, and organizations.

Search for a substance, then click Summary. On the next screen you will see links to Safety and Hazards.

Contains pertinent chemical hazard and safety information for more than 3,000 compounds. The LCSS provided by PubChem is intended to augment, not replace, safe laboratory practices and procedures for chemical information, such as those found in chemical inventory management systems or laboratory-specific personal protective equipment information. This links provides background on the LCCS program: https://www.nap.edu/login.php?record_id=18706&page=http://confchem.ccce.divched.org/2015FallCCCENLP3

Fact sheets and in-depth reports of hundreds of commonly used substances.

Lab safety modules and other resources covering many specialized topics.

Useful for safety managers, chemists, and engineers alike, helps both small and large companies identify, address, and manage chemical reactivity hazards.

Links to guidelines, free publications, and other resources.

A collaborative project providing information on best practices in laboratory safety for scientists.

A source of general industrial hygiene presenting key information and data in abbreviated or tabular form for chemicals or substance groupings (e.g. cyanides, fluorides, manganese compounds) that are found in the work environment.

Links and resources from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Provides unique crowd sourced data content containing hazardous reactions that can be used to alert scientists to potentially dangerous experiments.

Covers chemical safety issues in academic and industrial research labs and in manufacturing. It is a forum for exchange and discussion of lab and plant safety and accident information written primarily by the staff of Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society.

From the Committee on Prudent Practices in the Laboratory of the National Academy of Sciences.
Also available as a PDF download https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55878/,

From the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

Collects and shares Standard Operating Procedures for safe laboratory practices.

Letters to the editor of the American Chemical Society weekly news magazine. This index is alphabetized by the chemical involved in the letter.

A journal where researchers can share and view incidents and near misses without blame or shame for those involved, to educate and prevent others from experiencing similar consequences.

This independent government agency has many videos on chemical safety.

Chemical & physical data, health & safety data, regulatory data, and environmental fate data for the commonly used solvents.

Hazard assessment of common solvents

From Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society.

Links to resources on chemical safety.

Supporting a Learning Safety Culture in Laboratories.

Resources, training materials and tools for laboratory safety, and securing your laboratory chemicals that could be misused.

A system designed to assist emergency responders in hazardous material incidents. WISER provides a wide range of information on hazardous substances, including substance identification support, physical characteristics, human health information, and containment and suppression advice.

Coordinates work done by projects to study and establish the safety of nanomaterials.

A list of 169 compounds from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

A free online course from the American Chemical Society.

A free online course from the American Chemical Society.

Before using any reagent for the first time, you may want to see its basic properties, especially any safety issues for this substance. The convenient to use one volume book the Merck Index has concise summaries for more than 10,000 common substances.
You can find this book in the library's reference collection, call number RS 51 .M4. If you cannot find your substance by browsing through the book, there are both name and formula indexes at the back of the book.

An extensive reference source on chemical safety. Shelved in the Science/Engineering Library's reserve collection; call number T 55.3 .H3 B73 1999.

This independent federal agency has produced videos based on real accident investigations.

Nine videos on different aspects of chemical safety.

Free videos on many aspects of laboratory safety.

A dozen videos as various aspects of chemical safety, such as fume hood operations and handling pyrophoric reagents.

A free webinar from the American Chemical Society.

A collection of videos on many aspects of safety.

A catchy musical number about lab safety.

A short video from Northwestern University on the flammability of various fabrics and why FR rated lab coats are a preferred choice.

This instructional video developed by Linde North America discusses some of the important things you need to know for the safe handling of nitrogen.

Areas covered include the four ways to compress gases, hazards associated with compressed gases, proper storage procedures, marking and labeling, handling cylinders safely, connections and fittings, leak detection, and more.

These videos cover cover common lab situations and equipment" including: Fume Hoods; Compressed Gas; Flash Chromatography; Pipettes; Splash Zone. Note that these videos are not intended to replace formal instruction or a safety training program.

Explores all of the safety requirements and scenarios when it comes to working in a chemistry lab by yourself.