When students should wear gloves

[Matt_Coffs]

Good morning,

I'm looking for guidance on when students should be wearing gloves with chemicals. For example 0.1M copper sulfate SDS say to "wear chemical protective gloves" under the Exposure Controls section. Does that mean students should be wearing gloves when using a dropper bottle of 0.1M CuSO4 or does the fact that a dropper bottle is being used reduce the risk, therefore gloves aren't needed?

Any thoughts or links to relevant information would be appreciated.

[macca]

Ours wear gloves with all Chemicals no matter what strength. Blanket rule, then no room for teachers thinking it doesn't matter at certain strengths.

[Marama T]

We've got gloves that biodegrade in landfill (yay!), but I try to limit use anyway. I would not be handing out gloves for dropper bottles of 0.1M copper sulfate. If I were working all day long with large quantities of the chemical, yes, I'd wear gloves, but that's not what my job entails. The text associated with the practical (e.g. student textbook) will usually indicate if gloves are required. Also, it's really up to the teacher to decide this.

[RosalieL]

Ours wear gloves with all Chemicals no matter what strength. Blanket rule, then no room for teachers thinking it doesn't matter at certain strengths.

Gosh I wish our teachers would accept this kind of blanket rule. I've got teachers who won't even let kids (or at least strongly discourage) wear gloves for dissections (chicken wings, plucks etc) because "it's no different to cooking". Ummmm.... It's about teaching scientific methods, safety, preparing the foundations for later when you might be dissecting things with pathogens, or that are just disgusting if you touch them.

Obviously our school doesn't do gloves all the time, but I do send gloves to labs whenever they're using something that RiskAssess recommends gloves for. I'm flat out getting them to wear lab coats and safety glasses half the time, but I figure if I've done my job of providing them, it's on the teacher to make the students wear them.

I do recall recently reading that copper sulfate has changed and there's more potential danger/harm with it than previously thought.

[macca]

We have safety glasses have to be worn during all practicals, or they sit down. Ever seen what a broken scalpel can do, not pretty.