Safety Health and Environment (SHE)

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QA & Regulatory Support

Safety and respecting environmental protection: two top priorities for PCAS

PCAS has signed the Chemical Industry Union's « Commitment to Progress ». This voluntary choice by a civic-minded company, demonstrates its safety improvement and environment protection dynamic.

With eight production sites, in France, Finland and Quebec, PCAS has successfully developed a safety-environment culture which is common to all those in the Group.

PCAS applies two basic principles

Personnel safety and protection of the environment are fully integrated into the company's processes. All processes are systematically evaluated taking into consideration these two critical parameters from a sustainable development standpoint.
In both these fields, PCAS's policy is to find a happy medium between stringency and pragmatism. The Group adopts a global and versatile approach so that their implementation is compatible with cost control. Investments in environmental protection lead on the whole, to a reduction in polluting loads and better waste management.

Prevention is essential to safety policy

A risk identification and assessment approach is linked to each new process: toxicity study, stability test and thermal assessment for all the substances involved. R&D plays a major role in risk assessment. All this data is compiled into the process file. At that stage, the various regulatory requirements and documentation is also anticipated, this includes:

tox -ecotox data
labelling
specific transportation regulatory requirements
MSDS (material safety data sheets)

One manager per site takes over the responsibility for safety, under the authority of the site manager. The sites undergo three types of audits:

internal, at each development process stage;
crossed: carried out by specialist teams from other PCAS sites;
external (DRIRE).

MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheets)

The MSDS and EHS data collection process is integrated in any PCAS R&D project.

As soon as the development report is issued, the huge task of compiling the MSDS starts, in line with all the most recent regulatory and then during the whole product life cycle, distributing updated revisions safety documents which is also very time consuming.

PCAS acquired a dedicated MSDS expert system which is being implemented at all the sites.

With constant regulatory monitoring, it allows PCAS to stay up to date with the latest regulations and classifications (e.g. REACH).

The module is already GHS compliant, ensuring a double European and GHS classification.

Some of the significant improvements are:

Different categories of documents are pre-formatted: SDS, transport sheet, etc.
Special formats have been created for specific, businesses - for example, the IFRA conformity report, the cosmetics file, and many others.
Documents can be translated into any selected language with notification if a particular translation is missing.
It integrates a formal revision control.
Distribution and update of safety documents becomes completely automatic. Customers and partners get assigned a specific web access to only the latest revisions - this will be effective by mid 2009.