On May 15th, 2018, Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM) published on its website the Notice of Issuance of the Guidance on Safety and Risk Assessment and Grading of Manufacture and Storage Enterprises of Hazardous Chemicals. The Notice required local administrations of work safety to carry out assessment of enterprises that manufacture or store hazardous chemicals and grade them according to the results of the safety and risk assessment.
The grading of enterprises is based on a reference guidance. Starting from 100 points, enterprises could lose points due to hazardous chemical risk control technical capacity incompetence, or gain extra points for implementing advanced control methods or techniques. For example, if the enterprise has its own fire-fighting team, then it would be awarded 3 points or if the enterprise doesn’t have a registered safety engineer, then 3 points would be deducted.
The grading comprises 9 major aspects:
The inherent hazards of the chemicals or the manufacturing process;
The environment;
The design of the technology and process;
Equipment;
Self-control and safety facilities;
Staff qualification;
Safety management system;
Emergency management;
Safety management performance.
After a comprehensive assessment and grading, the enterprises would be classified as one of the 4 following:
Blue level: 90 points or above;
Yellow level: 75-89 points;
Orange level: 60-74 points;
Red level: less than 60 points.
And if an enterprise meets one of the 4 following conditions, it could be classified as red level directly:
The newly developed hazardous chemicals are directly put into manufacture without small tests, pilot tests, or industrial tests.
The chemical engineering facilities are not designed by a qualified institute and haven’t been assessed for safety design.
The operating staff of hazardous chemicals haven’t obtained effective qualification or don’t have high school education or above.
The enterprises had a major accident or an extremely big accident within 3 years; or had 2 or more big safety accidents within 3 years; or had 2 or more normal safety accidents within a year.
The work safety administrations would adopt different supervision policies based on the classification (color rating) of an enterprise. Enterprises classified as red or orange level would be subject to more frequent spot checks and stricter supervision. The whole assessment in different regions is expected to be finished by the end of Sep 2018 and the result should be reported to MEM by the end of Oct. After that, the assessment and grading would be carried out every 3 years.
