“Don’t be misled by History, or any other unreliable source.” — Will Rogers
I remember when I lost faith in safety data sheets – SDSs. Well, they were called Material Safety Data Sheets – MSDSs – then. I was a young engineer, and the only engineer, at a start-up. My boss, the owner, assigned me the responsibility of preparing the MSDSs for our products. When I went to confirm the formulation, he went ballistic. “We are not telling anyone our formulations…it’s none of their business.” Never mind that was the whole point of Hazard Communication, also known as “Right-to-Know.”
“Just call the solvent” (a known reproductive hazard) “mixed ketones.”
I didn’t, and if anyone reverse-engineered our products based on the MSDS, I never heard about it. As the production supervisor said, “I don’t know what the big deal is. We know our formulations, and we can’t even manage to make the product.”
How Can SDSs Be Wrong?
Safety data sheets are required by OSHA in the Hazard Communication standard. So, they have to be right. Right? Not really. OSHA doesn’t prepare SDSs, or approve the SDSs prepared by others. The manufacturers of hazardous chemicals (if manufactured in the United States) or the importers of hazardous chemicals (if manufactured outside of the United States) are responsible for preparing the SDS. OSHA instructs manufacturers and importers to “consider the full range of available scientific literature and other evidence concerning the potential hazards.” ( 29 CFR 1910.1200(d)(2) )
However, that same section of the “Right-to-Know” regulation goes on to say, “There is no requirement to test the chemical to determine…its hazards.” If a manufacturer or importer does not find any information in its search of the literature, they have no obligation to produce that data themselves. If they do not find the information, they are not supposed to make up answers. Instead, OSHA instructs them, in 1910.1200(g)(3), that “if no relevant information is found for any subheading within a section on the safety data sheet…mark it to indicate that no applicable information was found.”
In other words, if the information isn’t found, that’s okay. Just mark it “N.A.” Admittedly, finding an “N.A.” in an SDS has always seemed like the moral equivalent of “my dog ate my homework,” but that is exactly what OSHA allows.
Withholding Information
Some manufacturers simply don’t want to spend the resources necessary to get complete information for preparing an SDS. It is much less expensive to simply report that the information is “N.A.”
Some manufacturers are motivated by a desire keep their formula secret. While deliberately saying something false is “willful”, simply reporting the information as “N.A.” also works, and poses fewer problems. Actively lying is easier to prove than simply failing to disclose.
This also applies to manufacturers who do not want to share negative aspects of their products. Recently, the Bluegreen Alliance published as study, “Obstructing the Right to Know” that looked at how well manufactures reported on well-known hazards of highly hazardous chemicals. Their top-line conclusions were that
- 30% of the over 650 SDS examined included inaccurate chemical hazard warnings.
- 15% of SDSs with known carcinogens failed to warn of carcinogenicity.
- 21% of SDSs with known fetotoxins or teratogens failed to warn of reproductive hazards
Interestingly, the authors used publicly available scientific literature to make their determinations, from the same “full range of available scientific literature and other evidence concerning the potential hazards” that manufacturers are supposed to consider.
Making Mistakes
While the authors of the Bluegreen Alliance study pointedly argued that the omissions they found were a deliberate obstruction, Hanlon’s Razor states that we should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, incompetence, or neglect.” SDSs are prepared by people. Some are extremely qualified for the work. Some are little more qualified than the man in the street and only do the work because someone even less qualified delegated the task to them.
I recently encountered this while working on a project for a new plant. One of the engineers was astonished to discover that a key material in the process had an autoignition temperature (AIT) less than the flash point (FP). The AIT—the temperature at which a compound will spontaneously combust in air without an ignition source—he reported was 190°F (87.8 C). The same SDS gave 262.4°F (128 C) as the flash point—the temperature at which the liquid will generate enough vapor to form a flammable mixture with air that can then be ignited externally. It was truly odd; the temperature at which a material will spontaneously burst into flames should not be less than the temperature that enough vapors will evaporate to form a flammable mixture.
In a review of thirteen SDSs for the material, we saw the flash point reported as 262°F (128 C) more often than anything else. However, other SDSs reported the flash point as 190°F (88 C), 248°F (120 C), 259°F (126 C), and 271°F (133 C). They cannot all be right.
Those same thirteen SDSs told a different story when it came to AIT. Six of the thirteen reported the AIT as 446°F (230 C), while the other seven either didn’t report anything (in violation of OSHA regulations) or claimed that no data was available.
How Many Lies Must You Tell Before You Become a Liar
After considering just these two physical properties, we concluded that the FP was 262°F (128 C) and the AIT 446°F (230 C), which is well-behaved and what was reported together in three of the 13 SDSs. The other 10 either differed on one of the properties, or on both.
So, what is the lesson? A single SDS is not a reliable source of information. There can be, and are, inaccuracies in SDSs. After all, they are prepared by people, who are imperfect. As Ronald Reagan put it, “Trust. But verify.”
