Earlier this month, I was introduced to the term ‘wishcycling’. Wishcycling is the act of putting something into recycling without checking to see if it can actually be recycled. It was coined in the early 2020s as a way of describing how people recycle their consumer waste when faced with increasingly complex recycling requirements. When I learnt this term, I felt pleased to finally have a name for something but also felt bad that something I’ve been doing is such a problem it’s been named.
Also, earlier this month, I read an article in Lab Horizons (shameless plug for the magazine I edit), which reported on a study about whether chemists are taking enough care over toxicity testing of new synthetic materials. If you don’t want to read the article, a quick summary is that, shockingly, making new chemical structures and releasing them into the market is probably not a good idea.
Now, the cross-over between synthetic chemical regulations and my kitchen recycling bin might not be all that apparent, but it turns out they both suffer from a very human condition: wishing it’s all just kind of fine.
I’ve always been a bit hot on lab H&S. This is something that has only gotten stronger as I’ve moved between labs and seen various things that would make even the most experienced H&S auditor have heart palpitations. These kinds of H&S issues are often the result of little to no H&S policies being followed (or sometimes even existing). But even when there are robust (i.e. a piece of paper saying, pretty please do this) policies in place requiring Risk Assessments and COSHH forms, they quickly fall victim to wishing.
For those not familiar with RA and COSHH forms, they are fun little forms you fill in before running an experiment, used to make sure you understand how it might kill you (or kill the population of a small nearby village). For our EU readers, they are equivalent to REACH and CLP, and for our US readers, OSHA’s various forms. Other countries have variants of RA and COSHH forms, all of which have been similarly named from a giant bowl of acronym soup.
This H&S documentation is generally written by the people performing the experiment and often approved by the people ordering the experiment. There is a lot of incentive for everything to kind of be probably fine. This is especially true in complex experiments and experiments producing new and unknown materials. When filling out those forms, it is very easy to stop risk assessing and start ‘wishassesing’.
This is precisely what has already happened in synthetic chemistry. It’s easier to press ahead with inventing the next precursor to X or Y if you fill in a form that says nothing will explode despite the ominous ticking the trial batch made.
While synthetic chemistry has been in the press recently, it is not even close to the only field in science that is guilty of wishassesing. Everyone is somewhat guilty of it to a lesser or greater extent, especially when the assessment systems have so many objectively vague qualities (e.g. questions like “On a scale of 1 to 10, how risky is this?”).
I’m not sure I have the answer to wishassesing. But I hope that, like wishcycling, maybe the first step is to give it a name and try to persuade people to think about it more carefully. Guilt is a powerful force, and I know that knowing the term wishcycling has certainly made me think carefully before dropping a random yogurt pot into the recycling bin. Hopefully, ‘wishassesing’ will have the same effect, and I’ll think a little more and wish a little less. Which is a great last thought for an H&S article, but a horrible ending for a children’s movie.
