when adopting and implementing GHS system in Korea and to draft the revision proposal for Industrial Safety and Health Act taking into account of unique domestic situation. The research method is to conduct a survey for 2 month period from early April to late May in 2006 to 830 randomly selected chemical manufacturing, importing and exporting, and consumption companies out of all the companies surveyed by the Ministry of Labor under 2004 Work Environment Status National Survey. A total of 610 survey was collected and analyzed. The results of this thesis is summarized as follows , First, based on the survey analysis it is vital to conduct a national PR using pamphlet, internet, and daily newspaper and to provide technical assistance such as training expert and publishing GHS manual by expert organization such as Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA) for early settlement of GHS in Korea. Second, it is also needed to give a grace period of 1 to 2 years to minimize the dramatic impact for industry, to encourage the establishment of the GHS team utilizing safety managers within companies, and to develop and distribute the standard GHS software by government. Third, taking into account of difficult situation of small companies, KOSHA needs to provide a full technical and financial support for companies with less than 100 employees and especially for chemical manufacturing companies. Fourth, it is also needed to operate an Interministrial GHS Committee (IGC) involving 7 related ministries for smooth GHS implementation and to develop an infra by sharing responsibilities among related ministries and establishing internationally recognized organization for hazard classification, labelling, and MSDS.
This study is designed to assess the priority order of the chemicals to cause to generate occupational diseases in order to understand the fundamental data required for the preparation of health protective measure for the workers dealing with chemicals. The 41 types of 51 ones of chemicals to cause to generate the national occupational diseases were selected as the study objects by understanding their domestic use or not, and their occupational diseases' occurrence or not among 110,608 types of domestic and overseas chemicals. To assess their priority order the sum of scores was acquired by understanding the actually classified condition based on a perfect score of physical riskiness(90points) and health toxicity(92points) as a classification standard by GHS, the priority order on GHS riskiness assessment, GHS toxicity assessment, GHS toxic․riskiness assessment(sum of riskiness plus toxicity) was assessed by multiplying each result by each weight of occupational disease's occurrence.
The high ranking 5 items of chemicals for GHS riskiness assessment were turned out to be urethane, copper, chlorine, manganese, and thiomersal by order. Besides as a result of GHS toxicity assessment the top fives were assessed to be aluminum, iron oxide, manganese, copper, and cadium(Metal) by order. On the other hand, GHS toxicity․riskiness assessment showed that the top fives were assessed to be copper, urethane, iron oxide, chlorine and phenanthrene by order. As there is no material or many uncertain details for physical riskiness or health toxicity by GHS classification though such materials caused to generate the national occupational diseases, it is very urgent to prepare its countermeasure based on the forementioned in order to protect the workers handling or being exposed to chemicals from health.