Lists of Hazards

Chapter 3 of your text is a collage of definitions, regulation citations, and lots of lists. DON'T try to memorize them, just look them over to get an idea of what's there.

OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA promulgates rules about the health and safety of workers in their workplace. We cover that in next week's module. Most of the other lists in your text were composed to define compliance with a certain law. They are the law in reference to the particular situation defined in the law. Sometimes, these lists can be applied to other situations as guidelines or recommendations.

The Clean Water Act was a federal statute. One part of that law directed the EPA to generate a list of hazardous substances, the discharge of which was to be tightly controlled or eliminated. The EPA then promulgated regulations to make that list. Here's the list which was codified under 40 CFR 116.4, "Hazardous Chemicals" . Here's what the designations mean: The number "40" indicates the "Titles" in CFR, Code of Federal Regulations. Title 40 is where the US Environment Protection Agency catalogs the regulations it is responsible for promulgating. Perhaps in the old days, each title would have been a volume and the entire set of federal regulations would be 50 or so volumes. Actually, Title 40 alone has 24 volumes. Go here to scan an Index of Title 40. Click on the plus by Chapter I, then the plus by Subchapter D. The "116" would be the "part" or major section under the Title. On the index page, click on the 87 - 135 and you will get another index page with each part with the title or heading of that part.

Go to Hazardous Chemicals again and note some things. Besides the name of the chemical in the left column, there are often "synonyms." Chemicals have a proper chemical name, called the IUPAC name. For the many common chemicals, those used in commerce, the IUPAC name is seldom used, and the chemical is known by a trade name or common name. Often the same chemical has several common names. The most common is listed on the left and the other common names are synonyms and are listed on the right. In between is the "CAS" number of the chemical. That stands for Chemical Abstracts Service, and is compiled by the American Chemical Society. The CAS number, like the IUPAC name, is a unique identifier. Unlike IUPAC, the CAS is commonly used for indexing and searching for chemicals. Isomers, as used here, are chemicals with the same atoms and chemical weight, but slightly different structure - how the atoms are attached to each other - and perhaps slightly different chemical and physical properties. We should not have to delve into such chemical details in the course, but you should know, in a general kind of way, what is meant by the term isomer. Here a little review from another course that you can peruse, but only if you'd like.

So, if you were concerned about discharging Acrylonitrile to the environment, and you observe it is on the EPA's list of hazardous substances in the clean water act, you would instantly know that unlimited discharge of this substance is unacceptable to the EPA and hence hazardous. It turns out some discharges of these substances are legal, under some circumstances. We'll spend more time on that issue in Module 12. The point here is that the presence of acrylonitrile on those lists indicates it is a hazardous substance. We would have to dig further to find out why.

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