Lessons Learnt for Sme's Process Safety Management

Major chemical process accidents have resulted in loss of human lives and damages to environment. There can be no doubt that learning from accidents has been one of the important factors which has contributed to the improvement in chemcial accident prevention observed over the past half century worldwide.

To learn from accidents, accident reporting and publication are the two major approaches for the whole chemical industry. However, most of these accidents are not well-known and well-published in China so that lessons have not well been learned and a number of major accidents and environmental emergencies still occur every year in China. In the Major Accident Information website of State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS), there are only 15 accident investigation reports published between April 2006 to September 2012 with detailed analysis of causes and consequences. Moreover, among those accidents with detailed investigation reports published, about 80% accidents occurred in SMEs. Some common causes of those accidents are discussed in this paper for helping SMEs to learn lessons.

To prevent major accidents from happening again, process safety regulations and standards have been in place in western countries for more than two decades even though China has only recently started to officially embrace these issues with the adoption of its Process Safety Management (PSM) regulation AQ/T 3034-2010. In 2012, hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP) was enforced by SAWS to be used for hazard identification of chemical processes covered by the Key Supervision Lists of Dangerous Chemical Processes, the Key Supervision List of Hazardous Chemicals and the Major Hazardous Installation Identification Standard. However, compliance with this regulatory framework requires substantial resources and may therefore appear too complex to be efficiently implemented by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the chemical sector. This is of particular relevance as about 99% of chemical companies in China are SMEs, accounting for more than 80% of all chemical accidents. To address this issue, additional local regulations and planning activities related to process safety have been implemented in China, including the establishment of hundreds of chemical industry parks. However, simply relocating SMEs to chemical processes doesn’t prevent accidents. Most of those SME accidents with investigation reports published in SAWS’ website occurred in chemical parks.

To help solve these problems, UNEP’s “Responsible Production approach for Chemical Hazards Management along the Value-Chain” is introduced in this paper and suggested as a simplified PSM approach targeted specifically at SMEs which, regardless of handling hazardous chemicals in their daily operations, may not have the knowledge or capacity to efficiently implement PSM and may not fall in the scope of the PSM regulation AQ/T 3034-2010. By introducing PSM to SMEs in a more manageable way, relevant steps can be progressively implemented by companies towards full compliance with the current regulatory framework, contributing to increased safety in chemical industry parks in China.