International Chemical Safety Card

International Chemical Safety Cards (ICSC) are data sheets intended to provide essential safety and health information on chemicals in a clear and concise way. The primary aim of the Cards is to promote the safe use of chemicals in the workplace and the main target users are therefore workers and those responsible for occupational safety and health. The ICSC project is a joint venture between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) with the cooperation of the European Commission (EC). This project began during the 1980s with the objective of developing a product to disseminate the appropriate hazard information on chemicals at the workplace in an understandable and precise way.

The Cards are prepared in English by ICSC participating institutions and peer reviewed in semiannual meetings before being made public. Subsequently, national institutions translate the Cards from English into their native languages and these translated Cards are also published on the Web. The English collection of ICSC is the original version. To date approximately 1700 Cards are available in English in HTML and PDF format. Translated versions of the Cards exist in different languages: Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish and others.

The objective of the ICSC project is to make essential health and safety information on chemicals available to as wide an audience as possible, especially at the workplace level. The project aims to keep on improving the mechanism for the preparation of Cards in English as well as increasing the number of translated versions available; therefore, welcomes the support of additional institutions who could contribute not only to the preparation of ICSC but also to the translation process.

ICSC cards follow a fixed format which is designed to give a consistent presentation of the information, and is sufficiently concise to be printed onto two sides of a harmonized sheet of paper, an important consideration to permit easy use in the workplace.

The standard sentences and consistent format used in ICSC facilitates the preparation and computer-aided translation of the information in the Cards.

The identification of the chemicals on the Cards is based on the UN numbers, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) number and the Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS/NIOSH) numbers. It is thought that the use of those three systems assures the most unambiguous method of identifying the chemical substances concerned, referring as it does to numbering systems that consider transportation matters, chemistry and occupational health.

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