Transport of dangerous goods
What are dangerous goods?
Dangerous goods, or DG for short(also known as hazardous material or hazmat), are materials that pose a risk to health, safety, property or the environment during transportation.
Dangerous goods can be found all around us and include many everyday items. Products such as aerosols, magnets, bleach, batteries and rechargeable batteries, coolants, adhesives and even perfumes can pose a risk during transportation. Each of us is certainly familiar with this from our own experience, i.e at the airport security check before departure. This is the place where our luggage is checked precisely for the content of hazardous materials. Dangerous goods are divided into hazmat classes, including:
- explosive materials and objects,
- gasses,
- flammable liquids,
- flammable solids,
- toxic and infectious materials,
- corrosive materials,
- radioactive materials,
- miscellaneous hazardous materials and objects.
Packages containing hazardous materials can often be identified by the pictograms on them, usually in the form of a clearly visible rhombus. The color of this figure indicates the hazard, for example, flammability is marked in red, and explosive material is marked in orange. Non-flammable and non-toxic gas is marked in green, as all compressed air tanks have this color.
Road transportation of dangerous goods
What is ADR transport?
It is the transportation of dangerous goods by road in Europe. The ADR agreement was drawn up in Geneva on September 30, 1957 and signed by 9 countries, with the UN Secretary General as its depositary. Countries that signed the above agreement (including Poland in 1975) are obliged to comply with its guidelines.
The ADR Agreement is a comprehensive piece of legislation, covering a range of areas related to the transportation of dangerous goods. It consists of the proper Agreement, which defines the legal relations between the participating parties, and Annexes A and B, which contain provisions that broadly regulate the conditions of transport of individual dangerous goods by road.
The provisions of the Agreement are amended on a biennial basis - the updated official Polish version of the Agreement (consolidated text) is published in the Journal of Laws.
Provisions of the ADR Agreement
The files containing the provisions of the ADR Agreement are only auxiliary in nature and do not constitute a source of law. The source of law is the ADR Agreement promulgated in the Journal of Laws.
Necessary documents for the transport of dangerous goods
- ADR certificates
- Original product packaging
- MSDS Material Safety Data Sheets are documents issued before the manufacturers of chemicals that have been classified as hazardous substances. The obligation to issue a safety data sheet stems from the European Parliament Regulation 1907/2008, known as REACH for short. The regulation specifies in which cases a card should be prepared and what should be on it. It is important to know that safety data sheets apply only to hazardous substances, and not to all chemicals in general. Therefore, for non-hazardous substances, the manufacturer does not have to issue a safety data sheet, and users of the substance may not be required to do so.