Eddy First thing is to get yourself on proper COSHH assessor course so you understand what COSHH is about and why you need to do the assessments and when. In particular, you should appreciate that assessments are not substance based but (like all other RA’s) process based. So if you have a standard process for moving barrels across the road and you do it repeatedly, you will not need an assessment for each time you do it (unless of course you do something different each time).

Sypol is good if you have lots of substances It does not "do" the RA for you but it does take on the drudgery so you can concentrate on the important bits of COSHH RA. And COSHH RA requires a higher level of competence than most things us H&S folks come across, don't be tempted unless you are competent.

I would be cautious about using the Safety Data Sheet(SDS) as the basis for assessing the real hazard of the product. Firstly the reliability of the SDS is questionable. A study by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), the organisation responsible for REACH, found that of 1,181 companies they inspected in 29 countries, mostly ‘downstream users’, i.e. formulators, regarding compliance with REACH, 52% were producing safety data sheets described in the study as ‘deficient’. - ECHA – REACH-EN-FORCE2 Secondly the SDS will generally only list those substances for which a hazard statement exists. There are thousands of chemicals that have never been so classified but that can, in contact with the person (and particularly the skin), result in damage to health. For example, in his reference work on skin sensitisers de Groot lists 4350 chemicals known to dermatologists as sensitisers and which are sufficiently well known for a patch test protocol to exist. Only a small minority of these will have been identified as H317. Thirdly, the SDS only lists the constituents of the product ‘as supplied’. When used it is very common for there to be changes in the product and thus the hazard. Identifying the true hazard present when a chemical is used for a particular task is one of the more difficult aspects of risk assessment for COSHH. This can only be established by a combination of workplace investigation to establish exactly what happens to the chemical and evaluation of how this affects the hazard. This is why systems such as Sypol cannot, in my opinion, be considered a true risk assessment. Chris