Snow falls furiously across New England on this chilly February day. Excellent weather to curl up with my virtual notebook and blog about the day of three webinars and a meeting: yesterday.
First off, chemicals
From those fun days at age 6 on my mom’s kitchen floor “mixing water in the little tubes”, chemistry has fascinated me. Making one thing into another, understanding the world around me through atoms and molecules, even as a young teenager, held the key to it all. Cut to: you have to review a list of 60,000+ part numbers to determine which ones may contain DEHP*. Ack! Chemistry is fun(?)
About ten years ago, we had a watershed moment when the European Union announced REACH**, the most aggressive chemical control regulation at the time. Still holds that title in my mind. The aim of REACH is simple: reduce or eliminate the use of “nasty chemicals”. And it’s working!
The first of the three webinars yesterday had Stacey Bowers of Compliance and Risks covering this most mystifying of all regulatory disciplines: chemicals management. As REACH took hold, many other regions of the world started issuing similar regulations, and we find ourselves now in a highly regulated environment for all chemicals. This quarterly review went over a whopping 76 slides with updates from China to Denmark to Uruguay to the U.S. in under 60 minutes. Phew!
The most salient takeaway: chemical regulations are here to stay and ALL manufacturers around the world are affected.
Census data to explore
How much do you know about the census? Here’s how much I knew until yesterday: my town just sent out the forms a couple of weeks ago, and being the charming little New England town it is, I walked ours back right into the Town Clerk’s office. That was it.
During this webinar, hosted by the Small Business Administration, Alexandra Barker showed us the U.S. Census Bureau’s online tools to extract and report on census data. A part-time data geek myself, I was following along the live demo with my own browser, picking options and filters to see the display change in real time.
Though I’m not sure yet if this kind of data will take me through a quantum leap, it was definitely enriching to know how to access it. Anyone looking to open a public-facing business should learn about these tools!
Greenhouse gases, and a first-ever EPA report
Say what you will, and I’m sure you would, about climate change and how humans are affecting our planet. Fact: industries are emitting gases into the atmosphere. Fact: this has an impact on the environment.
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With this in mind, many companies have started voluntarily reporting their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions using guidelines such as the Carbon Disclosure Project. The EPA has caught up and is asking this year for the first triennial GHG report for large emitters, due on March 31.
During this final webinar of the day hosted by SESHA, Jesse Gonzalez of Trinity Consultants gave us a detailed overview of how the semiconductor industry emits GHG and best practices to handle the reporting now required by law. Any industry that emits gases should sit up and learn about this, you don’t want to miss the boat!
To wrap up, a first-time meeting
Shortly after moving to Bellingham last year, I came across the Bellingham Business Association and decided to join at the beginning of this year. Serendipity stepped in and not two days after completing the application process, I was sitting at their monthly meeting munching on delicious coal-fired pizza at Rock’n Coal Pizza and learning about online marketing.
For us solo practitioners, online marketing is a great way to expand our horizons and get our brand to shine. This presentation from Chris Jaeger of Practical Online Marketing gave me a few reminders and a lot of homework! As I work my way exploring and developing these new, unfamiliar skills, so I hope my web presence follows to show it. And you get to experience fun and informative blog articles like this one. A non-zero sum game for sure.
Learning is fun!
As always, I learn as I teach and I teach as I learn. A single day with four learning experiences is definitely remarkable, but hopefully not too rare down the road. Looking forward to more learning, and of course, a lot more teaching you about safety. Drop me a line or leave a comment below, I’m looking forward to it.
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Footnotes (sorry I couldn’t avoid some jargon!)
* DEHP or Bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, as you can learn from its Wikipedia page, is a handy little molecule that is added to plastics to make them flexible. See that nice hose on your lawn? It may contain DEHP if it was manufactured long enough ago. The catch is that it’s very toxic, as explained in this paper by the CDC, and definitely not something you want to be near.
** REACH stands for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals. Notice how the acronym doesn’t use the R for restriction? Coincidence? This all-encompassing regulation, enforced by the European Chemicals Agency, covers any product from the device you’re using to read this sentence to the giant vats of acid produced in a large chemical plant. And it was the motif of my daily life for many years. And yes, I once did have to review the entire catalog of 60,000+ part numbers to make sure we weren’t missing anything critical.
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