Chemicals and Safety #3: MSDS

When you buy a new car you get a user’s manual.

In just the same way, when you buy a chemical you get a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). That is, you may get one.

Australian law is that if the chemical you have bought is Dangerous Goods (that is, if it has a diamond on it – flammable, corrosive etc) – then the seller is legally obliged to provide you with one if you ask for one. That is, if you buy a bottle of turps from Bunnings and they don’t give you an MSDS at the point of sale they haven’t broken the law, but if you ask for one they must give you one.

The purpose of the MSDS is to provide the purchaser of the chemical with all the information they will need to use, store, or transport the chemical safely.

So this is generally a good place to start if you wish to get safety information about a chemical.  MSDS are readily available online, and if for for example you wished to know about a particular chemical which was an ingredient on something you had bought at the supermarket, you would just Google “vanillan MSDS” for example.

The more common the usage of the chemical the more hits you will get with your Google search – mostly from the companies that manufacture or distribute that particular chemical.  The less common a chemical is commercially, and the less dangerous it is, the fewer the number of MSDS is you will find, but I will say more about that later.

Now, it’s worth noting that you can get MSDS both for chemicals that are known by their formal chemical name, and those that are known by their industrial name.

In the case of vanillan for example, which is an industrial name, the MSDS will at some stage tell you its formal chemical name (in this case 4-Hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde), along with other synonyms.

So, you’ve found be MSDS for a particular chemical.  Now what?

The first point to note is that MSDS are our open to misinterpretation if you don’t know what you’re looking for.  The reason is that they tend to be very conservative – that is, they will often overstate the dangers or hazards of a particular chemical, and you therefore must know how to read them.

They can be a little bit like the safety instructions and you get when you buy and edge trimmer – it tells you to wear steel capped boots, overalls, gloves, and a full face mask when using them.  Which, of course is way over the top – all will you need is safety glasses in my humble opinion.

The silliest MSDS I think that I’ve seen is the MSDS for a lens cleaner – the stuff that you squirt onto safety glasses to clean them.  The advice on the MSDS was that you had to wear safety glasses when using the lens cleaner – so that meant that if you wanted to clean your safety glasses, you had to have a second pair handy to wear while you were cleaning the first pair.

Utterly ridiculous when all it was, was a detergent solution – that’s what I’m talking about – if you take some MSDS literally you would be scared to go out of the house.

So we need to know what to look at.  We’ll start digging into it tomorrow.