The Pharos Project is a project of the Healthy Building Network. HBN is:

In Vermont:
Melissa Coffin, Bill Walsh

In California:
Tom Lent

In Washington, DC:
Larry Kilroy, Sarah Gilberg, Sarah Pickell, Susan Sabella

In Maine:
Jim Vallette

MATERIAL SAFETY DATA SHEETS: MANY SIMPLY DON'T SAY

One of the main sources of information used to evaluate the health and safety of building materials is the Material Safety Data Sheet, or MSDS. In the United States, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires that MSDSes be available to employees so that they can be notified of potentially harmful substances they may come in contact with in the workplace. At the Pharos Project, the MSDS is often the starting point for our initial research on a product and its ingredients.

The first thing any researcher discovers is that MSDSes are often incomplete in their data and inconsistent in their format. Recently, the Pharos team has begun doing preliminary research into high performance coatings - specialty paints and coatings that are widely used in health care and other commercial settings. Some of the documents exemplify the MSDS conundrum.

For example, I found one manufacturer stating that their products contain no hazardous ingredients. But flipping later into the MSDS, the same manufacturer warns the user that, "This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." As a researcher, I'd like to know that the product contains carcinogens on the first page, not the last.

The reality is that manufacturers have great latitude to determine whether a chemical warrants listing on an MSDS and employers and employees have little or no other information available to them. Through Pharos, we're working to uncover the realities of what hazardous chemicals are actually in products as we build out our Building Product Library and add to our Chemical and Material Library of over 9,000 chemicals.

While we do that, it is wise to consider this about MSDSes: Many Simply Don't Say.

Julie Silas is a researcher with the Pharos Project and a health care expert with the Healthy Building Network.

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