COSHH
[ch 2: pages 36-37]Under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 (COSHH 2002) employers should not carry out work that is liable to expose employees to any substances hazardous to health unless they have made a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks. All employers must carry out a risk assessment, record any significant findings and review the assessment regularly.
The risk assessment must consider the hazardous properties of a substance, information provided in safety data sheets and any workplace exposure limit (WEL). A WEL is the maximum concentration of an airborne substance averaged over a reference period that an employee may be exposed to. It should not be considered a hard and fast line between safe and unsafe and where exposure cannot be prevented, it must be controlled to as low a level as is reasonably practicable.
Once a potential risk to health has been identified, employers must ensure exposure is prevented or adequately controlled, by working through a hierarchy of measures.
The emphasis is on prevention. The best way to comply with the requirement is to completely eliminate the use or production of substances hazardous to health in the workplace.
Many substances that are toxic or hazardous for workers also cause environmental damage and contribute to climate change, so using safer substitutes can also have environmental benefits (see Chapter 4 on air pollution and Chapter 5 on pesticides, for example).