11 thoughts on “Danger: Sand”

  4. Well, he’s right in both aspects of his commentary. The MSDS system is not super useful — although he’s wrong about it being useless — and it could have been better. I don’t think the difficulty is so much that it’s written in lawyerese. If you read the MSDS for sand, ha ha, the problem is just that whoever made it up (the vendor) was obviously in a hurry, and just cut ‘n’ pasted the same verbiage for any physically irritating inhalant.

    Any why not? What motivation does Fischer have for spending time and effort on preparing a MSDS? They don’t get paid for it, and they certainly don’t get paid more if they do a better job. They just get hammered if they don’t do it, or if some warning is missing from the thing.

    Arguably the problem is precisely that: that the agency responsible for preparing the MSDS is (1) not rewarded for useful and productive effort, and (2) not really concerned with the quality of the information anyway.

    MSDS should have been prepared by people who actually need them and use them, e.g. emergency responders, in consultation with chemists who are interested in safety issues (of which there are plenty). In the Internet age, it would not be hard for such people to get their heads together across big spans of time and distance to contribute to a central database of really useful information, written in plain and clear language — provided Congress passes a law first that prescribes immediate emasculation for lawyers who so much as glance at the results afterward — so that firemen running into a burning lab building and being told there’s blah blah and foo bar inside know what the heck to realistically do.

    Anyway, same old same old when it comes to well-intentioned government mandates made without a shred of awareness of human nature.

  5. Speaking of Lawyerese, you should see the label on the side of a container of bacterially filteried deionized water.

    It says that in the event of contact with eyes to flush with water.

    Of course, the product is the most pure water you can buy so you are washing out a pure product with a less pure one.

  6. What a pity lawyers don’t come with a Federally-mandated warning label. Say, on a piece of (very sticky) duct tape across their mouths.

  8. Carl, there’s some serious stupidity going on as well. You should see the MSDS for liquid hand soap in the restaurant where I work. It’s nearly as bad as the one for dihydrogen oxide, only these people were serious.

    Most of the sheets I see at work are remarkably consistent: don’t drink it, don’t breathe it, in case of ingestion go NOT induce vomiting, follow the advice of first responders, etc…

    In our case, it’s a classic example of “that which not prohibited is compulsory.”

  9. The state of California has (or perhaps had) some great warning labels. For a while, balsamic vinegar contained lead. The state of California has determined, without legitimate evidence in many cases, that many chemicals cause cancer. The funniest though is the warning about microwaves. How useful is it to know as you enter a doorway that there’s a microwave oven in operation somewhere inside an office building? California thinks you should know.

  10. Is the author seriously suggesting that we’d be better off without MSDSs? The content could definitely be improved, but something is better than nothing. At my workplace, we find that the MSDS is less useful for the chemists than for anybody else who encounters those chemicals and has to deal with them later. They’re also handy for conducted preliminary hazard analyses when setting up experiments. For example, I used the MSDS for nitric oxide to identify the OHSA tolerable exposure level – I was conducting an experiment related to air contamination, and the data was useful in selecting the concentration of the gas mix that I was diluting to the desired level for testing. In case of a leak, I could be certain that I wasn’t going to expose anybody in the lab environment to a hazardous level of a chemical that’s capable of eating your lungs at sufficient concentrations. I guess the author’s article says something about the cavalier attitude of academic researchers towards safety, compared to their industrial counterparts.

  11. I guess the author’s article says something about the cavalier attitude of academic researchers towards safety, compared to their industrial counterparts.

    The author is a research chemist at a major pharmaceutical firm. I don’t think he’s saying that we should get rid of MSDSs — he’s just complaining about their lack of utility the way they’re currently written.

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