Build your Chemical Hygiene Plan, one step at a time
Write an Effective Chemical Hygiene Plan (Templates, Tips and Tricks) is an online tutorial for writing your own Chemical Hygiene Plan: the written program OSHA's Laboratory Standard (29 CFR 1910.1450) requires wherever employees use hazardous chemicals in a laboratory. You do not just read about the plan. You build it, section by section, in a Word workbook that becomes your finished plan.
It is written for the people who write and sign the plan in education (school districts, private and independent schools, colleges and universities) and in industry (research, testing, quality control and manufacturing laboratories): Chemical Hygiene Officers, laboratory managers and safety staff, science teachers and department chairs, and administrators. The worked example is a high school; the standard, the workbook and the templates work the same way for a company or university laboratory.
What you build, lesson by lesson
- Start Here: what a Chemical Hygiene Plan is, what the standard requires, and which rule covers your workplace: federal OSHA or your state's plan, for private employers and public schools alike.
- Take Stock: your rooms, your chemical inventory, and how chemicals are bought, received and stored.
- Name the People: the policy statement, the Chemical Hygiene Officer and a named person for every duty.
- Choose the Protections: controls in the right order, protective equipment, fume hoods, eyewashes and other safety equipment.
- Write the Procedures: standard operating procedures, work that needs approval first, and the most hazardous chemicals.
- Prepare for the Bad Day: emergencies, spills and medical care after an exposure.
- Keep It Running: training, waste, inspections, records and the annual review.
- Tips and Tricks: areas beyond the main laboratory, such as art rooms and shops, the traps in published templates, and getting the plan adopted.
- Put It Together: assemble the plan, check it against every requirement of the standard, and adopt it.
Templates, a workbook and a worked example
- A 29-page Word workbook with a worksheet for every section of the plan, each tied to the rule behind it.
- A worked example in every lesson: the same step filled in for Sample High School, an invented public high school, so you can see what a good answer looks like.
- The finished sample plan: six pages, as a PDF to read and a Word file to adapt.
- Published templates compared: school plans from state agencies in Wisconsin, Colorado, Maine and Montana, university and research-laboratory templates, and working school district plans, with the traps to watch for when you adapt one.
Why this course
- Built on the rules: OSHA's Laboratory Standard and its Appendix A, OSHA and NIOSH guidance, EPA's hazardous waste rules and the state rules that cover public schools, each cited in the lesson that uses it.
- A plan that fits your workplace: the reasoning behind every section, so your plan matches your rooms, your chemicals and your people rather than someone else's template.
- A guided tutorial, not a test: there is no quiz. You finish with a plan.
- Online and self-paced: work through it on your own schedule.
