Chemical Inventory

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Managing chemical inventories at colleges and universities is one of today's major challenges for higher education. Organizational structure and diversity of activities at these institutions make resolving this issue most difficult, especially in light of rapidly evolving regulatory compliance requirements. Safety and compliance, waste minimization, emergency preparedness, and facility planning programs all benefit from knowing what chemicals are on site, their hazard potential, who is responsible for them, and where they are located. 

Stanford University has developed a web-based application for chemical inventory information management and compliance reporting throughout its research and service support operations. This application, ChemTracker, provides technology, information, and services to enable colleges, universities, and other not-for-profit organizations to efficiently manage the increasingly complex and expensive process of chemical-related regulatory compliance, as well as making chemical hazard and safety information readily available to laboratory and safety personnel.

The UC Santa Cruz Environmental Health & Safety Office has been collecting and maintaining the campus chemical inventory using an Access database. Recently UCSC joined the ChemTracker Consortium and EH&S is in the process of transitioning the campus to the new system. All the historical data from the last inventory has been migrated to ChemTracker so the most current campus inventory information is available to researchers.  

To set up an account, become a trained user and receive your password, please email ehs@ucsc.edu and include: 

Your full name
Campus Phone number
Name of Principal Investigator
Department
Each room your lab stores chemicals 

ChemTracker includes a detailed chemical reference database of approximately 54,000 pure chemicals, mixtures, and synonyms, the result of fifteen years of research by Stanford University Chemistry and Environmental Health and Safety personnel. This database includes physical property, hazard, toxicology, fire and building code (NFPA (National Fire Protection Association), UBC/UFC (Uniform Building Code/Uniform Fire Code), IBC (International Building Code), SARA (Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act), DOT (Department of Transportation)), many regulatory classifications, and other identifiers. Chemical inventory is linked to this reference database when entered into the system, either through user pick lists or automatic and semi-automatic processes. Added functionality such as Chemical structure searching and the ability to retrieve inventory lists of chemicals belonging to an "owner" with a single mouse click are also part of the ChemTracker system, as are built-in tools for managing inventory using container identity barcodes. 

More ChemTracker resources: 

Consortium home page with sites of interest and chemical information links
https://chemtracker.stanford.edu/