2013 Volume 21 Issue 3 Pages 31-41
Chemical hazards are too various for anyone to understand thoroughly; consumers want information that can be grasped as intuitively as possible and has a degree of guaranteed reliability. To create a comprehensive index for evaluating the properties of chemical substances, the use of a calculated distance as a hazard index was studied within the MT system (variation pressure). Results from the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS) were taken as the properties of approximately 1900 chemical substances for which information was provided by Japan's GHS Inter-ministerial Committee. A unit space of low-hazard substances was constructed. How the index was affected by the assignment of numerical values to individual hazards and by the handling of unclassifiable substances or substances with unknown properties, equivalent to missing data, was studied. The resulting chemical hazard index provides easy recognition of hazard level as a number, avoids underestimating the hazards of largely unclassifiable substances with unknown properties, and gives weight to the key hazards, even though GHS weights individual items similarly.
