By Joseck Alwala.
The ILO, which is a specialized agency of UN has pronounced that approximately one thousand new chemicals come into the market every year, and about 100,000 chemical substances are used on a global scale. They are found as mixtures in commercial products.
The abundancy not only puts the worker handling them at risk but also lays bare households through misuse or by accidents, and contaminate consumer products including food. Lack of chemical safety pollutes the environment and transposes the ecosystem.
Severance of Chemical safety is unfeasible. There is affluence of magnificence. Chemical operational safety dawned in remote ages. In around 1700 BC, there was the Code of Hammurabi, a legal text written in cuneiform. It contained 282 laws. The two most important were: Companies are responsible for the safety of their employees and liable for dangerous working conditions (Law 6), and Workers who cause an accident can be held accountable (Law 117).
In the 19th century, chemical safety got its roots when Occupational Health and Safety Act a reality. Lamentably, the aristocracy, including politicians, exclusively observe chronicles of the evolving occurrences of poor chemical handling and use. They overlook or neglect training the public on ten rules basics of chemical safety as outlined by UN such as: Perceive and recognize the chemicals you use, label clearly and correctly every chemical in the work place, put on the correct protective equipment dominated by your valuation taken for distinct work areas, genuine control and ventilation must be set up at a point volatiles subsist, stock chemicals in safety cupboards in their nominated localities and take out only the amount needed for the contemporary work procedure, mastery of emergency procedures must be taught to employees, and building evacuation plans should always be on display in a reachable area, hazard control systems must be routinely cleaned and perpetuated, consistently clean yourself down on leaving the workplace and do not eat, drink, smoke, or perform any other such sidetracking venture when working with hazardous chemicals.
The rejoinder, at inception, is to assess chemical hazards and set priorities concerning the safety in any organization and create emergency plans for the assessed hazards. Besides, technical measures must be used to prevent chemical hazards at source, and to prevent the transfer of dangerous chemicals.
The national government should create awareness regarding sound chemical management among stakeholders, particularly among the small and medium-scale enterprises, and a serious dearth of technical personnel in chemical safety management in both regulatory bodies and industries. There must be comprehension and coherence on what represents a chemical and its compounds, categories and historical conditions of use.
Tremulous consciousness of the complications of chemical safety, lack of framework to deal with it, and truancy of well-defined codification to battle it is to blame for the growing calamity. Let the state initiate and contrivance chemical safety and security management laws.
