What is chemical storage?
Chemical storage is keeping cleaning products securely, separated by incompatibility, in labelled containers, in a place occupants cannot access.
Separation is the safety-critical part. Products that react with each other — most seriously acids and hypochlorites — must not be stored where a spill from one can reach the other.
Security matters in buildings with children or vulnerable adults, where an unlocked cleaning cupboard is a real hazard rather than an untidy one.
Stores are also where the industry's housekeeping is visible, and a client walking into a cleaning cupboard forms an impression that is hard to undo.
In practice
A cleaners' cupboard under a stairwell.
It is locked, which is the part everybody gets right. Inside, products are stored above head height, two have been decanted into unlabelled bottles, and there is no ventilation.
The decanting is the one that hurts somebody: an unlabelled bottle is a product nobody can look up the data sheet for, including the person who has just splashed it.
Never into a drinks bottle. That one is not theoretical.
What goes wrong in practice
- Incompatible products stored together on the same shelf.
- Cupboards left unlocked in buildings with public or vulnerable access.
- Unlabelled decanted containers accumulating in the store.