Ultimate Guide to Storing Hazardous Substances
Posted on May 7th 2024 by Hannah Tilley.
At Workplace Products understand it can be overwhelming when it comes to controlling hazardous substances. However, ensuring the safe storage of substances is essential to protect workforces and public safety. Moreover, this ultimate guide to hazardous substances will give you a proper understanding of COSHH regulations.
What are Hazardous Substances?
A hazardous substance is anything hazardous to health. This can include, chemicals, fumes, dust, and more… This can include cleaning agents, paint, gases and biological agents such as fungi, bacteria and viruses. Often we overlook these are general day-to-day products, therefore ensuring safety is vital.
Your responsibility to COSHH Regulations
Firstly, what is COSHH? This regulation stands for the control of substances hazardous to health. Ultimately, everyone is responsible for managing and abiding my COSHH Regulations. This will ensure safety is in place across all fields in a business. Although, employers have the responsibility of ensuring everything is in place to make the environment as safe as possible. Tasks include regular COSHH risk assessment checks, training for employees and compliance monitoring. In addition, we offer fast and free UK delivery for quick implementation of regulations!
Understanding the Different Storage Requirements
COSHH and Hazardous storage come in many shapes and forms! Depending on your industry, you may require different cabinets to store your hazardous substances. How to distinguish this is easy as different industries have different colour cabinets for each. As hazardous specialists, we feature the full range of storage requirements including hazardous, flammable, agrochemical, and acid and alkali.
Read below to find out which is suitable for your industry!👀⬇️
Hazardous Storage
By far our most popular is our yellow or grey hazardous storage cabinets. These comply with COSHH Regulations and all include unique features for optimal safety. A key benefit to these cabinets is the two-point locking system. This ensures the cabinet is secure and limits access to hazardous materials. It is ideal for a wide range of industries that store hazardous substances, this can range from industrial, cleaning or even hairdressers.
Our best seller the TUFF Hazardous Cupboard 900 x 900 x 460 is a great candidate of this, with an adjustable galvanised shelf for easy storage. Extremely high quality, we manufacture in the UK… What’s even better is the TUFF range now features 30% OFF! For a limited time only!
If you need your cabinet and fast, our TUFF range arrives with next day delivery!
View our COSHH cabinets in grey here.
Flammable Storage
Generally in red colour, these cabinets are ideal for laboratories, factories, warehouses, and retail. Typically, this colour is a discreet solution, with the appropriate harmful signage included as standard.
What is a flammable liquid?
- Liquids including petrol or fuels
- Dusts such as coals, wood, sugar, certain metals or which may burn or explode
- Gases such as petroleum gas, methane
- Solvents including general paint, ink, adhesives and fluids.
The ideal cabinet for flammable materials, the Flammable Liquids Storage Cabinets is available in capacities 3-18 litres. We produce to the highest quality right here in the UK.
View the Flammable Liquids Range click here.
Agrochemical Storage
This particular range is suitable for farms, warehouses and production areas that contain agrochemicals or pesticides. Substances stored in these cabinets can include chemicals, fumes, dusts, vapours, gases or biological agents used in the agriculture and farming industry.
Identifying harmful substances in your business:
- Dusts can refer to plants, animals, compost or fermented material
- Pesticides, medicines and feed additives
- Fertilisers and soil improvers
- Cleaning products
- Paints, oils, lubricants, brake fluids and detergents
- Products used in silage making
Shop our Agrochemical & Pesticide Storage today!
Acid & Alkali Storage
Our range of acid & alkali storage falls under COSHH Regulations to ensure maximum safety in the workplace. Undoubtedly, workplaces that require this storage can include schools, colleges, science departments, metal works, mechanics, hospitals and laboratories.
What should i store? Corrosive substances can cause damage or even destroy other substances when in contact. Caustics can burn, corrode or dissolve living tissue which include acids and bases. To prevent injury, maintain correct handling.
Our Acid and Alkali Storage Cabinets are up for the task! It features integral sumps to collect leakage and adjustable spill-retaining galvanised shelves. This allows segregation of chemicals with secure storage with key access. Moreover, the 2 point locking system restricts access which is ideal for schools and education settings to ensure safety when working in laboratory environments.
Know your Signs for Storing Hazardous Substances
What signs you require on your storage can be quite confusing! So, let’s run you through the differences…
Luckily, our cabinets come with the right signage for each, making the job a little easier!
The majority of cabinets we sell feature flammable labels with the ‘🔥’ symbol and the health/hazard ‘⚠️’ symbol. Signage makes it easy for the users to detect the use, and what items go where!
Acid and Alkali cabinets will feature the corrosive sign to show danger of liquid materials.
Lastly, signs you may have seen is the health hazard and toxic symbol which outlines the danger of consumption or contact etc.
Speak to the Specialists
Not sure which cabinet you require? You can contact our friendly team to discuss the COSHH cabinet right for you! Speak to us via live chat or call us on 01922 743833 for expert advice. With free site surveys and price match promise… our team will get you the very best deal!
