easy as 1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4

April 24, 2006 at 11:57 am | | everyday science, lab safety

Labs at Stanford are supposed to have all these safety posters everywhere: we’re super cautious about lab safety. Part of this has to do with the hyper-regulation in California. Here’s one of my favorite posters:

chemsafety123

It’s so easy now! Really, the best part is that there are even bulleted subsections under sections under numbers. That’s more than simple: it’s complex!

6 Comments »

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  1. By the way, while we’re on this topic, remind me to rant about the chemical inventory software sometime.

    Comment by sam — April 24, 2006 #

  2. Hell hath no furry like the chemical inventory software.

    Comment by william — April 24, 2006 #

  3. But you can choose between two equally useless interfaces. That’s the kind of power one must wield carefully.

    Comment by kendall — April 25, 2006 #

  4. Quick! There’s a small spill that doesn’t involve immersion in liquid or risk of overexposure. What do you? WHAT DO YOU DO!?

    Comment by jordan — April 25, 2006 #

  5. EASY! First, get a paper towel (use paper to ensure maximum death to trees, thus compounding any damage to the environment you may be causing)! Then, get a volatile organic solvent that is a known ozone depleter (here chloroform, trichloroethane, dioxane, and others can be used). Cover the spill with volatile organic solvent (VOS) to now scale it up from a minor spill to an environmental catastrophe in the making! If you’re wearing safety gloves, take them off! You don’t want to contaminate them with nasty chemicals! Remember, you can wash your hands, but you can’t wash latex (or nitrile). Actually, you can, but that’s not the point. Using your bare hands, test the spill to make sure it doesn’t burn you or absorb through your skin into your bloodstream. If it doesn’t, it’s considered “safe” and you should proceed as follows. If it does harm you, you should still proceed as follows.

    Take the paper towel and mop up the mess. If necessary, rinse it with water after mopping up some, then mop up some more, rinse with water, and repeat. Since you may not know what the spill is composed of, go ahead and just rinse directly into the drain. Those EH&S guys are real pricks when it comes to accidentally mislabeling waste containers, so it’s best to avoid the problem altogether.

    After mopping a majority of it up, throw the towels directly into the wastebasket. Since these may pose an environmental risk, go ahead and get a piece of paper and write “DANGER” on it. Ball this up and throw it in the SAME wastebasket! That way, anyone rummaging through the trash will know that dangerous chemicals are there.

    Congratulations! You have just cleaned a dangerous spill!

    Disclaimer: (This was a joke…)

    Comment by charles — April 25, 2006 #

  6. You know, whenever your gloves come in contact with a chemical contact, you’re supposed to remove them and treat them as contaminated waste. But to do so means having to take the gloves off, and don another pair of gloves to dispose of the previous pair. But now those new gloves have contacted the previous pair of gloves (now officially considered contaminated solid waste), so those would technically be considered contaminated. Rinse, repeat, and watch baby Jesus cry.

    Comment by kendall — April 25, 2006 #

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