COSHH Explained for Chemical Buyers

What is COSHH?

COSHH stands for the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 — the UK law that requires employers to control exposure to hazardous substances in the workplace, so that they don’t cause harm to employees or anyone else who might be affected. It’s one of the pieces of legislation most relevant to any business that buys, stores, handles or uses chemicals as part of its operations.

COSHH is enforced in Great Britain by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which is also the authoritative source of guidance on what the regulations require and how to meet them. If you take one thing from this article, it should be that the detail on your legal duties lives on the HSE’s own website — this piece is background reading, not a substitute for it.

What counts as a “substance hazardous to health”

COSHH covers a broad range of materials, not just the obviously dangerous ones. Substances hazardous to health can include:

• Chemicals and chemical products, including many everyday cleaning, industrial and agricultural chemicals
• Products containing chemicals, such as paints, adhesives and coatings
• Fumes, dusts, vapours, mists and gases arising from a process
• Biological agents, in some workplace contexts
• Germs that cause disease, where relevant to the work being done

If a substance is classified as hazardous under the UK CLP (Classification, Labelling and Packaging) Regulation, it will normally fall within scope of COSHH, and its Safety Data Sheet (SDS) is the starting point for understanding what those hazards actually are. Our companion article, What Is a Safety Data Sheet (SDS)? A Buyer’s Guide, covers how to read one.

Who COSHH applies to

COSHH duties generally fall on employers, who must assess and control the risks from hazardous substances used or created by their work activities. That includes businesses of every size — a small workshop using a single drum of a cleaning chemical has the same underlying duty as a large manufacturing site running several chemicals through a process, even if the scale of the assessment differs considerably.

If your business buys chemicals — whether that’s a cleaning product, an industrial acid, an agricultural input or a water treatment chemical — COSHH is likely to apply to how you store, handle and use it, separately from anything your supplier is required to do under REACH and CLP to provide hazard information in the first place.

The core steps of COSHH compliance

At a high level, HSE guidance sets out COSHH compliance as a cycle of practical steps:

• Assess the risks — identify what hazardous substances are present, how they’re used, and who could be exposed and how.
• Decide what precautions are needed — based on the assessment, working through the hierarchy of controls (eliminate, substitute, control exposure, then PPE as a last resort).
• Prevent or adequately control exposure — put the chosen controls in place, whether that’s ventilation, safe systems of work, or personal protective equipment.
• Ensure controls are used and maintained — controls only work if they’re actually used correctly and kept in good condition.
• Monitor exposure, where necessary — for some substances and processes, this means measuring exposure levels rather than assuming controls are working.
• Carry out health surveillance, where appropriate — relevant where a substance could cause identifiable disease or health effects linked to the exposure.
• Prepare for accidents, incidents and emergencies — including spills, so that a plan exists before something goes wrong, not after.
• Ensure employees are properly informed, trained and supervised — so people understand the risks and how the controls they’re asked to use actually work.

None of these steps happen in isolation from the product information a supplier provides. A COSHH assessment for a specific chemical should draw directly on that product’s SDS — particularly the hazard identification, exposure controls/PPE, and handling and storage sections — rather than being written from general assumptions about “similar” chemicals.

What a COSHH assessment actually looks like in practice

A COSHH assessment doesn’t need to be a lengthy document to be adequate — it needs to be specific to the substance, the task, and the workplace. In practice, that usually means recording: what the substance is and its hazard classification, how and where it’s used or stored on site, who might be exposed and for how long, what controls are already in place, and what additional precautions (if any) are needed to bring the risk down to an acceptable level. HSE publishes free guidance and template tools to help with this, and for higher-risk or more complex processes, many businesses bring in a competent health and safety adviser to help carry out or review the assessment.

Where COSHH fits with buying decisions

For a buyer, COSHH is a useful lens when comparing chemical products or suppliers: the SDS tells you the hazards, but your own COSHH assessment tells you whether you can actually control those hazards safely in your specific setting, with the equipment, ventilation and training you have available. Two products with similar performance characteristics can carry quite different practical handling requirements — worth knowing before an order arrives, not after.

H&I Chemicals supplies a wide range of industrial, commodity and speciality chemicals to UK trade and industrial customers, with an SDS available for every product. If you’d like a copy ahead of carrying out an assessment, or want to discuss your requirements, get in touch and request a quote.