Process Safety
While the elements of process safety have been around for a long time, an incident happened in India in 1984 that changed the public view of industrial process safety. Here is a web page (about half way down the page) that overviews the story quite well [second story down on the page] Bhopal. From this BBC overview, you can read Dow Chemical's story about the event and Greenpeaces take on things or the survivors You should not be surprised that they differ.
Bhopal occurred in 1984. Reacting with lightning speed, OSHA promulgated a process safety standard in 1992. It's a surprisingly brief standard. The key elements are:
If an industry uses or stores large quantities of flammable or highly hazardous
chemicals at one location, then they must implement a process hazard analysis.
That analysis will result in written operating procedures, training, inspection,
testing, and periodic reviews. There are many formats of analysis and operating
procedures possible:
| What-if scenarios |
| Checklists |
| Hazard and operability studies |
| Failure mode and effects analysis |
| Fault tree analysis |
The employer must document
| Priority |
| Number of potentially effected employees |
| Age of processes (and equipment) |
| Operating history (past failures and problems.) |
The processes that generate hazardous waste will be part of the process safety
evaluation. However the purpose of the process is to evaluate causes and consequences
of
| fires, |
| explosions |
| toxic releases |
| spills |
on site, not necessarily to minimize waste.