Hazardous Material

Hazardous Material

Summary of the Article

Shelly J Stephens begins the article with describing the emergency and what measures United States Government has created legislations and bodies that work under the conditions known as emergency. The article that is under review is an case study, which defines the safety measures needed to be taken in case of any emergency situation (Stephens, 2009). Shelly stressed in her article that in case of industries emergency response team must be ready to cope with any emergency. Shelly uses Amway Hazard Management Team as her case to elobrate their practices. She mentioned that today, emergency response team should stay active for responding to many kinds of HAZMAT incidents, which also includes attacks from terrorists. Shelly in her article mentioned the basic facts that federal agencies bear the responsibility in United States for the regulation of HAZMAT. These organizations include EPA or Environmental Protection Agency and OSHA or Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Moreover, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has created standards set of procedures in order to respond to HAZMAT. Shelly has also discussed several Hazmat team initiatives that can be taken. In the conclusive part, Shelly had discussed proposed recommendations for Amway Hazmat Teamb (Stephens, 2009).

Critical Analysis

Shelly stressed that vast arrays of industrial waste materials are deemed to be hazardous. The category includes: discontinued products such as those made from PCBs; used products containing metals such as lead or mercury; used chemicals such as solvents or acids; chemicals created as by-products such as dioxin; used equipment such as the spent uranium rods from nuclear reactors or flat batteries; used fuel such as ash from coal-fired power stations and non-toxic but potentially hazardous by-products of mining such as rubble. Not all hazardous waste originates from conventional industrial production. Other sources include: waste from hospitals which may contain disease-carrying organisms; military waste such as scrapped missiles and household waste such as sewage (Probst & Bierle, 1999).

In accordance with the author the recognition of hazardous forms of pollution has prompted industrialized countries to develop hazardous waste management programmes over the last 30 years, which in turn increases the demand. National programmes do, however, vary in their favoured methods of disposal and in the emphasis given to minimizing waste creation and to recycling (Cherrie & Semple, 2010). Similar to Shelly various other authors have researched on this subject using various methods. Their work was mainly focused on waste management. What Shelly did not mention is the obligations of the producers of hazardous waste (Stephens, 2009):

To separate properly and not mix hazardous waste, avoiding mixtures particularly those involving an increase in hazardous or to interfere with its management.

Packing and labeling containers of hazardous waste in the form determined by regulation.

Keep a record of hazardous waste produced or imported and their destination.

Provide companies authorized to carry out waste management information necessary for proper treatment and disposal (Camplin, 2008).

These obligation procedure could add valuable information in the existing article, which in my opinion is ...