Dangerous Goods: Reviewing Your Building Sites Storage

It doesn’t matter whether you’re working in a construction industry or a processing plant—workspaces dealing with hazardous goods need to eliminate or minimise the risks associated with these dangerous items and chemical byproducts.

Familiarising yourself with proper storage regulations is essential to ensure that you tread on the right side of the law. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law, after all.

The reason why these laws are in place is straightforward: no one wants to be endangered during the job. Not you, not government bodies, and definitely not the workforce exposed to these conditions day in and day out.

The good news is that there are resources online that can help you deal with this risk. In particular, these resources provide detailed guidelines on how to identify the level of risk, how to designate the goods handler, how to handle the goods with care, and how to store these goods in the appropriate compartment.

If your dangerous goods handling protocols have been subpar over the past year, then it may be time to reevaluate your processes and adjust them accordingly. A slight mistake can have devastating effects, so you must uphold proper protocols and refine them to keep up with the times.

Without further ado, here’s a refresher on the guidelines to know when reviewing your building onsite’s storage solution for dangerous goods. Let’s start!

The Five Steps of Reviewing Dangerous Goods Storage

Storing dangerous goods is of utmost importance. There are a lot of regulations surrounding it, all made to support workplace and community safety. 

Failure to comply is considered business malpractice, and your business can be fined and penalised depending on the severity of the negligence.

To stay on the safe side, ensure that you follow proper dangerous good storage guidelines. This article will give you a start-to-finish rundown on how to best handle dangerous goods.

1. Identification and Classification

The first course of action to initiate the dangerous goods assessment and storage process is identifying and classifying said goods.

Knowing the type of good you’re dealing with is crucial as it dictates how to best approach it. 

It’s possible to mishandle goods when you wrongly classify them, so to reduce the chance of increasing safety and environmental risks, then be sure not to overlook the classification process.

There are nine main classifications of dangerous goods. They are as follows:

• Class 1: Explosives – Substances or articles that can explode or cause an explosion.
• Class 2: Gases – Includes compressed, liquefied, or dissolved gases.
• Class 3: Flammable Liquids – Liquids that can easily catch fire, such as gasoline and alcohol.
• Class 4: Flammable Solids – Solids that are highly reactive or can cause a fire through friction.
• Class 5: Oxidizing Substances – Materials that can cause or intensify a fire through the release of oxygen.
• Class 6: Toxic and Infectious Substances – Includes poisons, pathogens, fungi, and other agents such as prions.
• Class 7: Radioactive Material – Substances that emit radiation, which can be harmful to health.
• Class 8: Corrosive Substances – Materials that can cause severe damage to living tissue or other materials.
• Class 9: Miscellaneous Dangerous Goods – Substances that present a hazard during transport but don’t fit into the other classes, such as dry ice or lithium batteries.

You and all the handlers should also read the product’s safety data sheet (SDS) for more information on the properties of the dangerous good or substance. 

Furthermore, familiarise yourself with the respective laws regarding each classification that applies to your business. For instance, if you’re dealing with flammable liquids, the respective law for it is AS 1940.

Reviewing these points can give a more comprehensive overview of the nature of the good and how to best handle it.

2. Assess The Risk Level and Storage Conditions

Once you’ve classified your dangerous goods, the next step is to know the various types of risks you can experience with them. 

Knowing the full extent of these risks can give you and your company the information to make preparations in advance on ways to handle them if they were to happen. The more comprehensive you are with each risk’s description, the better. 

These risks may be categorised further as risks to human health, the environment, and property damage. You can utilise the product’s safety data sheet (SDS) to get a clearer idea of the chemical’s characteristics and the reactive components of the substance in question. 

From there, you can more easily list the level of risk associated with each substance. If these substances are near one another, don’t forget to include the risk of these substances when reacting with these other dangerous compounds.

An example would go like this. 

If your product has a lithium battery inside of it, then your risks and concerns may be that the product is flammable and potentially explosive under certain conditions, like when in contact with water. 

Furthermore, lithium batteries, when stored in close proximity to other flammable materials (like other lithium batteries), can also be a property and environmental hazard if they were to ignite and react with one another.

Finally, a lithium battery explosion can be a big hazard to human health in that explosions can cause severe third-degree burns or even fatalities. Inhaling residue from a lithium battery explosion even from a distance can also cause health risks like pulmonary oedema and adverse GI symptoms.

3. Implement Safety Measures Before Putting Goods in Storage

The next step after assessing the risks of the item is doing all the things necessary to curb these associated risks.

A good measure to do just that is by following an internationally acclaimed system known as the Hierarchy of Control. This system includes five specific steps that have to be followed in the order from first to last. The steps are as follows:

1. Elimination: Can you remove the risk?
2. Substitution: Can you use another less harmful good?
3. Engineering Controls: Can you design the property to make it safer and reduce chemical exposure?
4. Administrative Controls: Can you uphold the safest work practices in the presence of a chemical or dangerous good?
5. Personal Protective Equipment: Can you protect workers with the right protective wear?

When creating a risk-free environment, it’s critical that you follow all these steps from the start. 

If you neglected to make any engineering controls and jumped straight to requiring your workers to wear PPE in the presence of the lithium battery, for instance, then that’s ineffective and a deviation from the rule.

As such, be sure to follow this system whenever dealing with dangerous goods. Train your personnel to uphold these systems too. This can maximise the odds of you having no harmful incidents in your work environment.

4. Store The Item Appropriately

Now here comes the fun part: storing the item in its rightful compartment.

Once again, double-check the product’s safety card and the risks associated with mishandling the item. Get an idea of how much ventilation it needs, the right temperature, and other pertinent factors for safe and non-reactive safekeeping.

Furthermore, look into goods that are incompatible to store together. The SDS and chemical safety documents can give you some information regarding that. However, if you want to be on the safe side, contact the supplier for both chemicals for verification.

Once you’ve confirmed what items can be put where then proceed. You’ll need to put them in designated cabinets fit for their hazard class, like Storemasta Flammable Storage Cabinets for Class 3 items and explosive storage cabinets for Class 1 items.

These storage solutions are built to protect the good and limit its exposure to external factors through heavy-duty construction. Be sure to review the cabinet’s quality and certification; you want to ensure that they’re compliant with local regulations and meet their standards.

5. Conduct Regular Audits and Inspections

Once a handler has stored the items properly, then great—mission accomplished! But the job isn’t over yet. 

To maintain a safe building site’s storage facility, you’ll have to continuously adjust your risk control process to ensure that your workplace is safe at all times. This is especially true if there have been incidents wherein the dangerous good was at close risk of exposure. 

For instance, a change that you can make may be something like increasing the “No Smoking” radius of your storage zone from 50 metres to 100 metres. Doing this can make the place safer, more compliant, and a better workplace altogether.

We hope we’ve helped you in safeguarding your dangerous items!