[DCHAS-L] OSHA HazCom reinterpreted

As many of you are aware, I’ve cataloged every OSHA Letter of Interpretation (LOI) concerning 29 CFR 1910.1200, the Hazard Communication Standard, on my site at https://www.ilpi.com/msds/osha/index.html 

Alas, the continued availability of an LOI on OSHA’s web site does not establish that its guidance remains current. Of the 494 official HazCom interpretation letters that OSHA has issued to date, only two were explicitly announced as withdrawn and only  25 bear an archive notice warning that they “may no longer represent OSHA Policy”. And that notice does not explain which of those conclusions remain applicable, if any, That’s just 5%. 

Thus, when you search OSHA’s library of LOIs at https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/interlinking/standards/1910.1200/standard_interpretations with a HazCom question, the chances you’re getting accurate contemporary information is low. And that ends today, at least on my site.

As my site has captured all HCS versions and compliance directives since HCS 1994, I have a really good data set to feed to an AI for analysis. And so, with AI doing the heavy lifting followed by human review, I have put a commentary on each of these 494 pages that compares the originally regulatory context to current requirements so the reader can understand what general themes and specific regulatory content, if any, are still valid and presents the reader with a framework for addressing the questions in the current regulatory context(s).

These are color coded - green when the general principles apply, yellow when caution should be applied and red when the guidance/regulation is unambiguously out of date. The ILPI assessment on each page includes several of the most salient related LOI’s (we see many topics come up again and again, FDA labels or HAZWOPER vs HCS, dust, lithium batteries etc,) so the reader can how OSHA’s positions have evolved on each particular topic without having to resort to the site search function.

Obviously, these are editorial opinions and I don’t speak for OSHA. Further, LOI’s are inherently limited - they cannot create additional employer obligations or change a standard's meaning. But they are the best we’ve got. OSHA has only issued one LOI concerning HCS 2024 to date and that was over two years ago.

So I’ve just converted what was a stagnant pool of historical data into a highly interlinked resource to help enable contemporary HazCom compliance.

Let me take you on a brief tour.

External links to OSHA and other official sources have a little arrow at the end of the hyperlink and those without that are links to my SDS Hyperglossary, FAQ, or my enhanced copies of the Standard and its enforcement directives. This screenshot is from https://www.ilpi.com/msds/osha/I19870825.html

The commentary is not limited to a blurb at the top. If you are reading along about 1910.1200 or any other OSHA standard, you get a note about that with a link to the pertinent data. So in https://www.ilpi.com/msds/osha/I19941006.html we see:

And because we have all this data archived, these notes will reach back into it. So in https://www.ilpi.com/msds/osha/I19950602.html we see 

And it understands how portions of the standard evolved, so if you are looking at one of these letters and see a reference to something that has changed, you know what it changed to. For example, in https://www.ilpi.com/msds/osha/I20011023.html 

A key point throughout is that pre-GHS involved a hazard determination which was replaced with a hazard classification. See https://www.ilpi.com/msds/osha/I19991101B.html

I even leveraged the new threaded capabilities of the DCHAS archive in this expanded note on https://www.ilpi.com/msds/osha/I20010323.html because OSHA’s answer is so clearly Bad:

All of this is just a taste - you really have to take this thing for a test drive.

This also completes my revamp of the SDS/HazCom site. I will continue to add new FAQ or HyperGlossary entries, of course, and I have an SDS quiz still on the to-do list, but I am moving on to another long-standing project before circling back to still more DCHAS archive improvements.

Best wishes,

Rob Toreki

Safety Emporium - Laboratory and Safety Supplies 
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