Journal of Environment and Safety
Online ISSN : 2186-3725
Print ISSN : 1884-4375
ISSN-L : 1884-4375
Proceedings of ACSEL2015, The 2nd Asian Conference on Safety and Education in Laboratory, December 1-2, 2015
Characteristics of chemical risks in academic research laboratory
Yoshito Oshima
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2016 Volume 7 Issue 2 Pages 95-97

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Abstract

Research at the university level is expected to be original and pioneering. In tandem with broadening technology and more diversified research fields, the likelihood of dealing with new technologies and of developing unknown new substances has grown. Actually, in academic laboratories, researchers conduct a broad spectrum of experiments, and handle many chemical regents in very complex ways at different places in the laboratory depending on the experiment purpose. However, even many of these researchers are unaware of the potential safety risks that are inherently inevitable. The Radio Frequency Identification system was employed to focus on the fluctuating characteristics of research activities and glean information from reagent checkout logs, chemical bottle traffic, and other similar data on chemical reagent behavior in an actual university laboratory. Such information was heretofore unobtainable by conventional chemical inventory system methods. Case studies were conducted to analyze experiment behavior in active university chemical laboratories, by monitoring experimenter behavior and chemical handling during experiments using fixed point observation technique. From this analysis,experimenter behaviors as well as the time duration in which experimenters handle chemicals for each operation are discussed from the perspective of deviation from the original protocol. The information obtained by observing experimenter behavior and chemical reagent usage in actual chemical laboratories is expected to raise the precision of discussion on the reasonable assessment and management of chemical risks in academic laboratories.

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© 2016 Academic Consociation of Environmental Safety and Waste Management,Japan
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