About
What is CLP Mastery?
CLP Mastery is an expert live and online system helping professionals learn to classify, label, pack and compile Safety Data Sheets for hazardous chemicals in the EU, GB and NI. It combines live online weekly training over a 6 week period with monthly Ask Us Anything sessions, to give support over the whole year. Once the live training is finished for the year, we are “open every day” for Self-Serve trainees.
CLP Mastery isn’t just a training course, it’s a complete ecosystem of tools to enable you to classify, label and pack, and compile SDSs without using software, or giving you the methods to provide evidence to check and challenge the outputs from software.
CLP Mastery has been running as a live training course in person or online since 2010.
What is CLP Fastrak?
CLP Fastrak is a simplified version of CLP Mastery, to help kick-start your CLP and SDS journey, which runs over a 3-day period (morning sessions).
It was developed in 2024 as a way of training software users in the principles behind the software, although it also helps other people too.
Who is CLP Mastery or CLP Fastrak for?
Our courses are for people who have, or will soon have, direct responsibility for classifying, labelling and producing SDSs for hazardous chemical products, in GB, NI and EU. We also cover “pure” GHS, which helps when you’re dealing with other jurisdictions.
We train industrial chemists, chemical engineers, regulatory affairs specialists, Health and Safety officers, and anyone with that responsibility as part of their work. We’ve also helped several DGSAs get to grips with CLP and REACH, as it’s quite a different system to Dangerous Goods.
Do you need to be a qualified chemist to take the course?
Generally, you need a GCSE or O-level/O-grade in Chemistry to be able to take the course, although a higher qualification helps. If you’re not a chemist, as long as you have access to one in your business, you should be fine.
Who wouldn't benefit from these courses?
We don’t want to waste anyone’s time, so we won’t accept trainees who are in education, or in management without direct responsibility for chemicals.
Is there a certificate from the courses?
We provide a certificate of attendance for CLP Fastrak, and a certificate of completion, with a list of modules, for CLP Mastery (as long as you complete the homework to a satisfactory level).
Is either course accredited externally?
We have looked at accreditation from various bodies. We don’t think accreditation is appropriate for CPD purposes, as the certificates already show the time which you’ve spent in face-to-face learning.
Accreditation through a reputable third party, such as the RSC or IOSH is possible, but with such a fast-moving set of regulations, parts of any course are likely to be out of date by the time it’s been accredited. We also don’t want to give our proprietary methods away ;)!
This issue affects every course covering CLP and SDSs – in order to become accredited, you can only cover “the basics”, which don’t change much, rather than reflecting all the extra things which we think industry staff will benefit from understanding.
How are you qualified to make and deliver this course?
Janet Greenwood is a soil scientist by training, who ended up in the chemical industry by accident, but loved being an industrial chemist. She is also a trained teacher at Secondary School level, with Qualified Teacher Status.
While she has taken a couple of external courses on this topic, most of the material has come from reading the regulations and attempting to implement them. This is how every training course in this area started out when the CLP and REACH regulations came out – nobody knew anything about them, so it was all “first principles” learning.
Many trainers in this area are either full-time trainers or desk-based consultants. TT Environmental don’t just compile SDSs, they use them in their consultancy work in Environmental Permitting and COMAH Environmental Risk Assessments, which Janet believes gives her a different, more practical perspective on the SDS.
As a co-founder of the Chemical Regulations Self Help Group, she has been involved in quarterly discussions including CLP and REACH for many years, and sees herself as an eternal student who is trying to share what she’s learned in as effective a way as possible.
Will taking this training make me "competent" to author SDSs?
There’s currently no standardised external exam for SDS compilers, unlike the DGSA exams, for example. So it’s difficult to know exactly what REACH Annex II (and the GHS standard) mean by “competence”. However, we believe that completing CLP Mastery successfully will definitely help demonstrate that you have received relevant training, and it should mean that you can compile an SDS reasonably well. (The HSE state that “there is no such thing as a perfect SDS”).
How long has TT Environmental Ltd been in business?
TT Environmental was set up on the 20th August 2001, so we’ve got a track record in supporting the chemical industry and chemical-using industries.
You can find our consultancy website here: https://ttenvironmental.co.uk/
Our free weekly email newsletter, Chemicals Coffee Time here: https://chemicalscoffeetime.co.uk/
And our work with the Chemical Regulations Self Help Group here: https://www.chemselfhelp.co.uk/
If you’d like to join us, click the button below to talk with Janet: