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Numerous injuries and fatalities in chemical laboratories in the United States over the past few decades have suggested the need to take measures that go beyond mere compliance and toward promoting safer practices. A collaboration between the Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources and Purdue Process Safety and Assurance Center assessed the current safety culture in chemical laboratories at their academic and industrial partners by conducting safety surveys. Key areas of improvement were identified from the responses to the safety surveys, which if addressed can mitigate the severity of safety incidents or prevent them from occurring. The findings indicate that a majority of the respondents from academia conduct comprehensive lab safety trainings (∼80%), have standard operating procedures for potentially hazardous activities (∼90%), regularly discuss safety-related issues during lab group meetings (∼85%), or are involved in routine safety inspections (∼85%). However, fewer of the academic respondents were aware of a database for safety incidents in their departments (∼50%) or utilized a standard safety review process for new experimental setups or modifications to existing setups (∼70%). The results from industry respondents suggest that improvements to commonly used hazard evaluation tools and increased accessibility to comprehensive databases can increase the effectiveness of hazard evaluation processes. Additionally, recommended best practices and guidelines are provided for researchers within the scientific community to develop key safety documentation that will both strengthen the safety culture and improve safety performance in their laboratories. Taken together, this safety initiative highlights the much-needed attention and effort that are beneficial to promote improved safety culture within academic and industrial chemical laboratories.

In the past several years, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has found an increase in the frequency of laboratory accidents and injuries. An independent survey of industrial and academic laboratories by the authors indicated the shortage of documentation on best practices and lack of free and user-friendly risk assessment tools to be some of the key reasons for the occurrence of safety incidents. Thus, development of a framework to document, assess, and mitigate hazards is a critical starting point for ensuring safe laboratory practices. To address this requirement, Reactive Hazards Evaluation Analysis and Compilation Tool (RHEACT), an online platform to compile and scrutinize hazards-related information, was developed. When planning an experiment, the researchers provide RHEACT: (1) information about the chemicals involved in the reaction, in the form of Safety Data Sheets (SDS), and (2) operating parameters of the reaction. Through the user-supplied SDS, an operational hazard matrix and a chemical compatibility matrix are generated. In addition, adiabatic temperature rise of the reaction is estimated to ensure that the chemistry is within user-controlled bounds. The user is provided with a broad initial evaluation of potential hazards and is notified of safety concerns associated with the reaction before conducting the experiment. We believe that this user-friendly online tool will help engender a safer laboratory working environment.

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