ards of wood pellets and safe handling procedures. Then, beginning 2007, af-ter the fatality at the Port of Helsing-borg, Melin, together with the Biomass and Bioenergy Group (BBRG) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) carried out comprehensive research on wood pellet off-gassing. Subsequently, Melin produced two new versions of the MSDS: one for bulk pellets and one for bagged pellets. In 2015, Canada passed a Hazard-ous Products Act which set out new in-formation requirements for hazardous materials. Canada aligned its Work-place Hazardous Materials Information System with the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals. This meant that WPAC’s MSDS now needed to be replaced by a newly formatted document with addi-tional information, now known simply as a Safety Data Sheet or SDS. For the past year, Melin, on behalf of WPAC, has worked on two new SDS documents for bulk and bagged wood CanBiom0916-Kahl-2 20.01.16 11:06 Seite pellets. The new SDS documents are 1 compliant in all respects with Canadi-an requirements as well as those of the Globally Harmonized System of Clas-sification and Labelling of Chemicals. The new documents are now complete and ready for distribution. The former MSDS documents are now obsolete. The new SDS documents – which have been copyright registered in Can-ada and the United States – are avail-able for use by all WPAC members at no cost. Members who wish to rely on the new SDS documents are required to sign a license agreement with WPAC. In return, WPAC will supply each licensee member with a customized, unalterable form of each SDS document, which the member can then copy and distribute to all parties along the supply chain from plant to customer as a means of ensur-ing that everyone who is involved in handling wood pellets is aware of the hazards and will handle the wood pel-lets safely. An obvious question is, “Why the need for a license agreement?” The an-swer is to protect WPAC from liability. WPAC was highly diligent in research-ing and preparing the new SDS docu-ments. Nevertheless, there are bound to be some along the supply chain who will ignore or fail to follow the advice in the SDS documents. This means that there is a risk that there could be future catastrophic incidents and we need to ensure that WPAC is indemnified from the risk of such incidents. Moreover, we need to ensure that the documents that we issue are not altered and that as new information becomes available, we have a process to update and circulate new versions of the SDS documents to licensed users. We hope that the information con-tained in our new SDS documents will help eliminate future pellet-related in-juries and fatalities. WPAC would like to thank Staffan Melin for his efforts in researching and creating the new SDS documents. • For more WPAC news, visit www.canadianbiomassmagazine.ca. KAHL Wood Pelleting Plants Quality worldwide. AMANDUS KAHL GmbH & Co. KG · SARJ Equipment Corp. · Mr. Rick B. MacArthur 29 Golfview Blvd. · Bradford, Ontario L3Z 2A6 Phone: 905-778-0073 · [email protected] www.akahl.de CBM_Kahl_SeptOct16_CSA.indd 1 Canadian BIOMASS 2016-09-16 7:36 AM 9
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