National Research Council committee suggests chemical safety working group

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board should plan ways to alert the chemical industry of safer manufacturing processes, according to a congressionally mandated report recently released by a National Research Council committee.

Jackie MacDonald Gibson, PhD, assistant professor of environmental sciences and engineering, served on the NRC’s “Inherently Safer Chemical Processes” committee as a safety and risk assessment expert. The group’s goal was to identify ways chemical manufacturers could improve their safety protocols.

“We aimed to broadly encourage chemical manufacturers to avoid getting into situations in which there was potential for putting the public – and themselves – at risk,” MacDonald Gibson said. “Plants that store large volumes of hazardous substances onsite must be especially cautious. Designers must think of methods that are inherently safer – ones don’t involve storing large volumes of substances or that don’t require mechanical equipment that might fail.”

The committee’s main recommendation was that the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which is responsible for investigating all accidents in chemical production facilities, convene a working group. The group will plan ways to make the chemical industry more aware of manufacturing processes that minimize use of hazardous substances, substitute more hazardous chemicals with less hazardous ones and simplify manufacturing controls to reduce the number of possible failure points.

There are challenges to implementing inherently safer chemical manufacturing processes, MacDonald Gibson said. She said there are no agreed-upon approaches for deciding whether one safety process is inherently better than another.

 

“It’s very possible that one process might be superior in one category, but it would be inferior to a second process in another category,” she said. “There must be an outlined decision-making process for how chemical production plants can explicitly consider ways to minimize use of hazardous substances and simplify design so that complex safety systems, which may be prone to failure, are no longer needed.”

 

The significant price tag associated with any potential change in manufacturing process also can be a challenge and a deterrent.

 

The committee was formed in 2008 in response to an explosion at the Bayer CropScience factory in Institute, W.Va. The explosion killed several workers, sparked a fire and could have exposed surrounding residents to methyl isocyanate (MIC), a highly toxic chemical involved in the catastrophic deaths of thousands in Bhopal, India, in 1984.

 

Ultimately, the committee’s report can be used to start a broader conversation about plant safety, MacDonald Gibson said. The chemical manufacturing industry could use the document to consider how to fully adopt inherently safer processes in future plants. It also can be of use to others outside the chemical manufacturing industry.

 

“I think communities could use the report to go to companies and ask if they’ve thought about inherently safer processes for producing their products,” she said. “Communities can now say the National Research Council has said it’s a good idea to think about these things.”

 

MacDonald Gibson’s colleagues on the safety committee were Elsa Reichmanis, PhD, chair, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology; Paul Amyotte, PhD, professor of chemical engineering at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada; Peter Beak, PhD, professor emeritus at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Michael Elliott, PhD, associate professor of city and regional planning and public policy at Georgia Institute of Technology; Wayne B. Gray, PhD, professor of economics at Clark University; Dennis Hendershot, staff consultant, Center for Chemical Process Safety, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, New York; Andrea Kidd-Taylor, PhD, assistant professor of community health and policy at Morgan State University in Baltimore; Michael K. Lindell, PhD, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, at Texas A&M University at College Station; and Jeffrey J. Siirola, PhD, technology fellow, Eastman Chemical Company, Kingsport, Tenn.

 

The committee’s report is available online.

 

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