Commercial Availability, Safety, and Hazards

The importance of being able to obtain chemicals commercially, being aware of necessary laboratory precautions, and having access to hazardous-property information is essential for students and researchers. This chapter provides commercial availability links to individual chemical company catalogs and to websites that are linked to multiple commercial sources. It describes laboratory-safety information resources and provides hazardous-property information, for both individual and classes of chemicals, and includes appropriate search techniques. Information on commercial availability, safety, and hazards is interrelated in the sense that commercial chemical companies are responsible for providing Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) for their products. The MSDS for a substance provides basic physical-property information, possible hazardous properties, and instructions for safe use