The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) recently amended its April 8, 2020 Hazardous Waste Management Guidance During the State of Emergency for the COVID-19 Pandemic.
On May 18, Governor Baker announced the State's Plan to safely reopen the Massachusetts economy, while minimizing the health impacts of COVID-19. The guidance includes mandatory sector-specific standards and recommended best practices for sectors that are eligible to open in Phase 1.
OSHA recently issued a guidance document on Preparing Workplaces for COVID-19 that focuses on determining employees’ risk of occupational exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in order to identify the appropriate control measures that can be put in place to protect employees from exposure.
Watertown announced yesterday that due to the COVID-19 emergency they will be postponing the effective date of their new regulation (Biotechnology and the Use of Recombinant DNA Molecule Technology) from May 1 until July 1, 2020.
The terms risk and hazard are used often in the safety world, many times interchangeably. They have very different meanings, however, and when using these terms, care should be taken to use them appropriately.
If your facility is registered with the MA DEP as a Large Quantity Generator (LQG) of hazardous waste, don’t forget that 2020 is a year when biennial reports must be filed. Biennial reports are due by March 1st of even numbered years for any facility that exceeded the LQG threshold during the preceding odd numbered year, even if your facility is no longer registered as an LQG.
Did you know that violations related to the OSHA Hazard Communication standard ranked #2 in the OSHA top 10 list for most frequently cited violations in 2018? Common citations included not having a written program or safety data sheets (SDS) for all chemicals, lack of employee training, and deficiencies related to secondary container labels.
OSHA has been involved with a long-term project to be aligned with the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) of classifying chemical hazards and providing labels and safety data sheets for hazardous chemicals.
Many of Safety Partners’ clients hold Controlled Substances Registrations (Researcher) for the research use of controlled substances. In Massachusetts, a controlled substance includes all drugs regulated by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in schedules I through V as well as Schedule VI, which is defined as all prescription drugs, which are not included in any other schedule.
Local recombinant DNA ordinances, including those of Boston, Cambridge, and Lexington to name a few, require compliance with the NIH Guidelines for Recombinant DNA Molecules (originally published in1986) as well as revisions and amendments to the Guidelines.
Proposed changes to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) Sewer Use Regulations (360 CMR 10.000) were published in April 2019 and a public hearing on the changes was held this week on May 13.
