WELCOME
What a changing world we live in. Since our last newsletter, Covid-19 has impacted us all again. We feel particularly for our Auckland people – hang in there! It’s surprising how quickly we forgot the detail about the different levels. It took a bit of getting used to the social distancing requirements, even in the Waikato.
GIVEWISE
Our quiz night fundraiser is booked. We will be at the Keg Room, Rototuna on the 14th of October at 6.30pm. Please click on the link to see the invitation. We would love to see you there.
Huggable Hearts. Huggable Hearts is a family-run organisation providing grieving families who have lost a baby with a fabric heart made to their angel's birth. They operate solely by donation. This can be fabric, filling, rice or money. https://www.huggablehearts.co.nz/
CONSULTANT CORNER
Each month one of our consultants (Tracey, Chantelle or Patricio) will provide you with a snippet of health and safety information. This month Patricio will chat about what she has been up to.
Pato’s Patter
Many times, we purchase chemical products for specific projects, we use them once and then we store them away. But probably nobody takes the time to verify what the requirements are or the optimal conditions to store these products. We may be putting together two chemicals that are incompatible and generating a potential emergency.
If we take this to the scale of a business, and the quantities we store are not small, the potential for an emergency is considerably greater, as are the consequences. A good example of this is what happened recently in Beirut, where large quantities of ammonium nitrate were stored for more than 6 years without proper supervision or maintenance.
This is why it is always recommended to carry out a regular inventory check, verify that the containers are in good condition and without leaks, eliminate products that are not used and that have been stored for a long time, and always have the latest version of the SDS, to have the updated information of our chemical products.
That is why we recommend having a hazardous substances register, and keeping it constantly updated, this will facilitate the work when identifying possible storage incompatibilities or specific requirements. In addition to using the Hazardous Substances Calculator (https://www.hazardoussubstances.govt.nz/calculator), a tool that will help you work out what key requirements you need to meet, based on the hazardous substances you use, handle, manufacture and store at your workplace.
