Managing modern hazards A Z A R D O U S C A R G O
H
Regulatory review
summit on sustainable development, which called on this system to be in place by 2008. The GHS has been developed by a
Designating a material as ‘hazardous’ means that care has to be taken when handling and moving it. More and more materials are falling under that designation, writes Peter Mackay, Managing Editor, Hazardous Cargo Bulletin.
A
sk the layman what he under- stands by ‘hazardous materials’ and he might mention steaming
heaps of hazardous waste, or perhaps those mysterious trains that rumble through the suburbs late at night carrying anonymous flasks of radio- active materials. Conversely, ask a container shipping line what the term means to it and it may point out that up to 10% of all the boxes its ships carry include regulated dangerous goods. These will include everyday items – household bleach, nail varnish remover, laptop batteries, cigarette lighters, secondhand cars, fireworks – as well as a whole litany of industrial chemicals that help make 21st century life what it is. Attempts to codify dangerous goods
date back more than 100 years and the rules in force today have been devel- oped from various sets of regulations imposed by air carriers and European rail operators beforeWorldWar II. Until recently the regulation of dangerous goods in the workplace and in the home was left largely to national legis- lation, but in the late 1950s the United Nations established a committee to look at the international transport of dangerous goods. The aim was two- fold – to make the process as safe as
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possible and, just as importantly, to encourage the free flow of trade. The UN Recommendations on the
Transport of Dangerous Goods,which is now updated every two years and acts as a model regulation for modal and regional authorities to follow, describes the classification of dangerous goods according to the hazards they present in transit and sets out requirements for their packaging (including bulk pack- aging) and for hazard communication. The classification process is described by the equally important Manual of Tests and Criteria. Substances and articles are deemed
to be dangerous if their chemical and/or physical properties meet the cri- teria for a set of hazards. These include flammability, toxicity and corrosivity, and there are special categories for radioactive materials, explosives, oxi- dising substances, compressed gases, substances that react with water and those that present a hazard to the envi- ronment. A major change in emphasis came
with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which called for the establishment of a ‘glob- ally harmonised system’ (GHS) of classi- fication and labelling of chemicals for supply and use applications. This was reinforced at the 2002 Johannesburg
sister committee and leans heavily on the system of classification developed for transport purposes. The GHS docu- ment is also updated every two years but, while the fourth revised edition has now been adopted, it is in force in very few countries. Implementation measures are now in place in several other territories, however, and in the European Union (EU) the GHS is cur- rently being implemented by the EC Regulation on the classification, labelling and packaging of substances and mixtures (the ‘CLP Regulation’). This took effect for substances on 1 December 2010 and will be expanded to encompass mixtures from 2 June 2015. Although it was feared that the
development of the GHS system would make the existing transport regulations more complex, in the event much care was taken to avoid impacting the existing provisions. The GHS didmake a slight change to the flashpoint limit that defines flammability, which did bring some distillates within scope of the transport regulations; there were also some changes to the toxicity cri- teria, which affected the list of dan- gerous goods for transport. There is also currently something of an argu- ment going on among the transport experts as to how far they should go in adopting the GHS criteria for corro- sivity.
Working in harmony By now, the transport regulations have largely settled down into a consistent set of provisions. There are, naturally, regular changes necessitated by tech- nical progress, not least in recent years the development of innovative energy storage devices – lithium ion and lithium metal batteries, fuel cells based on various technologies, ultra-capacitors and nickel metal hydride batteries, for example –which all present identifiable risks during transport. There has also been an improvement
in the level of harmonisation between the various modal regulations and between national and regional provi- sions.While it is important that the var- ious modes are allowed to place additional restrictions that reflect the particular hazards involved – for air transport, for instance, there are addi-
continued on p38 ... PETROLEUMREVIEW APRIL
2011
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