Royal Society of Chemistry, the largest organisation in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences
Maintenance
- Safety in electrical testing: Switchgear and control gear [55kb]
- Electrical switchgear and safety [180kb]
- Asbestos alert for building maintenance, repair and refurbishment workers [15kb]
- 5 steps to risk assessment [650kb]
- SELECT & HSE guide on safe isolation procedures [500kb]
The following links will take you to guidance material including videos and case studies which can be used for toolbox talks and workforce training.
PCB's and You.
Do you know how to work safely with PCBs?
PCBs and YOU
OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE TO CHEMICALS
Research Report Series
All the above links are very informative.
PCBs and YOU
OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE TO CHEMICALS
Research Report SeriesAll the above links are very informative.
Calculate your carbon footprint....
Everyone has a carbon footprint - it's your own personal measure of how much carbon dioxide you create and how much you contribute to climate change.
Use the Act on CO2 calculator to find out what your carbon footprint is. You'll also get a personalised action plan with recommendations about how you can help tackle climate change - including links to further information on Directgov and the Energy Saving Trust website.
Friday 21 September 2007 07:00
Health and Safety Executive (North West)
HSE inspections highlight dangerous North West construction sites
A Health and Safety Executive inspection programme revealed that workers' lives were being put at risk at nearly one in three of over 1,500 construction refurbishment sites inspected nationwide.
In the North West 154 sites were visited with 38 Prohibition Notices being served to stop work immediately until corrective action was taken. Nineteen of the sites were in Cheshire and Merseyside, ten in Greater Manchester with the remaining nine in Lancashire and Cumbria (see table below)
The startling figures come after HSE North West Construction Inspector Nic Rigby managed the two-month programme of inspections that resulted in enforcement action on 426 occasions throughout the country.
Nic says: "New build operations have tightened up their act but there is still a lot of improvement required in refurbishment work. We can't see such work as readily, as it often takes place behind the walls of pre-existing buildings, but we are determined that the safety standards should match."
Stephen Williams, HSE's Head of Construction, said:
"Our inspectors were appalled at the apparent willingness to ignore basic safety precautions. It is completely unacceptable that so many lives have been put at risk.
"The simple fact is that despite knowing what they should be doing, too many people are prepared to allow bad practices to continue, even though last year 39 people died on refurbishment, repair and maintenance sites.
"We are determined to tackle this issue head on and will continue to take enforcement action against those rogues who flout safety precautions. Let me be clear to all those who put lives at risk - we will continue to carry out further inspections and will take all action necessary to protect workers, including closing sites and prosecution."
Work at height remains the biggest concern. Over half of the enforcement action taken during this inspection initiative was against dangerous work at height, which last year led to the death of 23 workers.
Stephen Williams continued:
"My advice to those who work in the refurbishment sector is to plan work, use competent workers and if working at height use the right equipment and use it safely."
The majority of Prohibition Notices issued during the campaign related to Working at Height, where unsafe procedures pose an obvious danger to workers' health and safety.
Good Order Prohibition notices are designed to prevent slips and trips by requiring good housekeeping and tidy sites to reduce the risk of the circumstances that cause them.
Good order notices can even save money as site operators are forced to tidy up and get their sites and resources organised.
Area No. of No of WAH WAH Good Good Other Possible
Sites Con- PNs Ins Order Order notices prose-
visited tractors PNs Ins cutions
seen
Lancashire& 89 116 9 1 0 0 4 2
Cumbria
Greater 36 43 8 1 2 1 6 0
Manchester
Cheshire 29 37 15 4 4 1 28 0
and
Merseyside
North West 154 196 32 6 6 2 38 2
WAH (Work At Height)
PN = Prohibition Notice, requiring an immediate cessation to work until a health and safety problem has been rectified;
IN = Improvement Notice, requiring an improvement to a health and safety problem within a specified time.
More guidance and advice is available at http://www.hse.gov.uk/construction/index.htm
Notes to Editors:
1. HSE inspected 1586 contractors on construction refurbishment sites throughout June and July. This inspection initiative follows on from the Fit Out Campaign in 2005 and the Watch Your Step initiative in 2006.
2. Reducing the number of injuries and deaths from trips and falls is a priority for HSE to help the construction industry meet its accident target by 2010. The Health and Safety Commission (HSC) published its Strategy for workplace health and safety in Great Britain to 2010 and beyond on 23 February 2004. The strategy aims to promote a vision of health and safety as a cornerstone of a civilised society and to achieve a record of workplace health and safety that leads the world. The strategy is available at: http://www.hse.gov.uk/aboutus/hsc/strategy.htm
3. Rt Hon Peter Hain MP, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions announced on 25 July 2007 that he would be holding a Forum to look at the number of fatalities in the house building and domestic repair/refurbishment sector of the construction industry.
4. HSE published the latest annual work related fatal injury statistics on 26 July 2007 which can be viewed at: http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/fatals.htm
Issued on behalf of HSE by Government News Network North West.
Untamed nature is being allowed to reassert itself
Imagine a Britain running wild
Bulldozers threaten the land around our cities, but elsewhere in Britain, untamed nature is being allowed to reassert itself
- Sunday August 19 2007
An epic landscape experiment is underway in the Netherlands. Its aim is to make Holland, the most developed of all European countries, wild again. Its method is to establish a vast network of natural habitats and wildlife corridors. Frans Vera, one of the ecologists driving the project, imagines it as a 'green circulation system' that will allow the freer movement of non-human species around north west Europe. Plans for the project show a mesh of green arteries, veins and capillaries, covering much of Holland and infiltrating Germany and Belgium.
The heart of this system is Oostvaardersplassen, an uninhabited coastal region of polder, scrubby savannah and wetland that, for nearly 40 years, has been allowed to run wild. Herds of red deer, Heck cattle and Konik ponies graze its drier reaches. Sea eagles and marsh harriers hunt its skies. Bittern, stork and egret haunt reed beds. Millions of geese, ducks and waders migrate through.
Oostvaardersplassen's biodiversity is remarkable. So is its proximity to Amsterdam - just 20 miles to the city's east. And so is its scale: 5,600 hectares, roughly a quarter of the area of the capital. Imagine the proportional equivalent here. A region the size of the Isle of Wight, in the position of south west Essex, turned over to its animals and plants ...
The management of Oostvaardersplassen is deliberately minimal. In this respect, it is truly a wild place. For our word 'wild' derives from the Old Norse willr, meaning uncontrolled or self-intending. Wild land, by this etymology, is self-willed land. Land that proceeds according to its own laws and principles. Land whose habits - the growth of its trees, the movement of its creatures, the distribution of its streams and reed beds - are of its own devising and execution.
By 2018, if all goes to plan, Vera's 'National Ecological Network' will involve 730,000 hectares: 17 per cent of Holland's total area. The existence of this brilliantly ambitious initiative testifies to the Dutch government's commitment to ecology and landscape (what a contrast with Britain), as well as to the general greenness of Dutch culture.
Could Britain go wild in a similar way?
Only a few years ago, the idea would have been laughable. Recently, however, 'wilding' has moved to the forefront of British conservation theory. Public interest in the values of wildness has also risen, a trend visible in television (the huge viewing figures for Coast and Mountain), in tourism, literature (the popular and critical rise of writing about nature) and photography, sculpture and painting.
There are 'wilding' projects now underway in Britain which resemble the Dutch example in ethos, if not in size. I recently visited two: both remarkable, both inspiring.
The first, Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, has a '100-Year Vision' developed for re-wetting a great tongue of land. This future fen would extend from Wicken in the north to Stow in the south, with an access corridor down into Cambridge itself, allowing the fen to become the city's 'green lung'. As the area expands - reclaimed from surrounding farmland - it will be grazed by Highland cattle, Konik ponies and possibly water buffalo.
The second is the Wild Ennerdale project. Ennerdale is a remote valley in the western Lake District, whose headwall rises to a cirque of magnificent mountains: Great Gable, Pillar, Kirk Fell, Haystacks. Through its upper reaches flows the clear-running Liza, which fills Ennerdale Water. To my mind, Ennerdale is the greatest valley in England. I once spent a winter night walking the mountain ridge that forms its western border, moving over snow in moonlight so bright I could read by it. Looking down into Ennerdale, I felt I was glimpsing another country.
Ennerdale is jointly owned by the National Trust, the Forestry Commission and United Utilities. Five years ago, after consultation with various stakeholders, these three signed up to a 'wild' vision statement for the valley, to increase the wildness of Ennerdale by 'allowing natural processes a greater hand in shaping the valley's landscape and ecology over the long term'.
In practice, this means that forestry will be reduced. Motorised transport will be restricted. Fences will be removed. Vast spruce plantation will be thinned and regenerated with native species: juniper, birch, ash, alder, poplar. Almost all commercial extraction will cease in the valley, save for the tapping of the lake for drinking water.
The contrasts between Wicken and Ennerdale are many. Fen and fell; forest and marsh; north west and south east. But both projects are tethered by similar practicalities and both are devoted, in different degrees, to the idea of wildness.
This is most powerfully the case in Ennerdale. No one knows what will happen in the valley once it has been left to itself. This is what makes the project so exciting. Because of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, most of the valley is accessible to the public. People will be able to watch the transformation of Ennerdale for themselves. I intend to return every year or two for as long as I can.
Ennerdale and Wicken are not alone. Ambitious re-wettings are underway at Alkborough, Wallasea, Alnmouth and Freiston. Wildlife trusts across England are working out how to join up their holdings. Native woodland regeneration is occurring all over Scotland, including at Loch Katrine in the Trossachs. There, the Forestry Commission Scotland has begun a massive reforestation scheme. The goal is to link the Katrine forest westwards to the RSPB woods at Inversnaid, and eastwards to the Woodland Trust's Finglas property, running from Loch Lomond to Callader.
So connections are beginning. British conservation is moving away from its 'crown jewels' mentality of isolated and cosseted sites. Fen is being linked to fen, forest to forest, glen to glen, heath to heath. Slowly, the Dutch example is being emulated. Acceleration is possible, too, for as the Common Agricultural Policy reforms itself, more and more farmland will come up for sale.
Indeed, Britain differs from Holland in this exciting respect: it has the space to create several large-scale core wildernesses. In the future, we might prove our tolerance of the notion that, as ecologist Mark Fisher puts it, 'human activity should not dominate every hectare of the landscape in Britain'.
Is this vision of a wild Britain impractical? Not with political and cultural will, of which there is an increasing amount. Is it desirable? Undoubtedly ... environmentally, economically, morally, spiritually and socially.
Take a minute to imagine a transformed British landscape. A Britain in which you could walk for a day and not leave the cover of trees. A Britain of elk, lynx, perhaps even wolves. A Britain filled, in the words of geographer Bill Adams, with 'new spaces for nature, both in the landscape and in our lives and imaginations'.
· Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places (Granta) is published on 2 September
Consumer electronics are taking over the world...
The Ampere Strikes Back
By Pete Smith
In a new report, 'The Ampere Strikes Back: how consumer electronics are taking over the world', the Energy Saving Trust predicts that by 2020 45% of the UK electricity, around 34TWh (terawatt-hours), will be devoted to running "gadgets" ...
The Coffee House - http://environmentdebate
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