Author: Richard Gottwald

With the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, the compressed gas industry has faced tremendous challenges and risk. Never before has it been so crucial for all members of the industry to work together to serve the needs of customers, while striving to keep employees, vendors, end users, and all others across our supply chains, safe. To that end, we at the Compressed Gas Association (CGA) are taking ongoing action, coordinating with our members as well as government agencies in the U.S. and Canada, and sharing new resources to aid in our industry’s response to…

Historically, the compressed gas industry’s products have been used in industrial, food and medical settings where employee safety and training have long been a priority. As the industry evolves, the same products are being increasingly used in new applications by new users – including by consumers. The safety standards published by the Compressed Gas Association consist primarily of high-level technical documents written by and for senior level engineers, but we recognize that CGA has a social responsibility to provide users – from new industry employees to consumers – with the information they need to interact with our members’ products safely.…

End User Safety Communications For the first 100 years of the Compressed Gas Association’s history, our members’ products were used almost exclusively in heavy industry – steelmaking, chemical production, food freezing – as well as in medical gas applications. But, in recent years, we have seen a growing number of these products used in applications that are either very close to, or at the consumer level: from retail shops selling liquid nitrogen ice cream, to marijuana processing for CBD oil extraction, to patients’ in-home use of medical oxygen. While we can’t tell individuals how to use our products for specific…

Sign Up Today to Get this Invaluable Training Resource for your Employees (Free for Participating GAWDA Members) Here at the Compressed Gas Association, we’re focused on developing safety standards that reflect industry best practices for handling industrial, medical and food gases, in as safe and effective a manner as possible. Our members who write these standards leverage in-depth knowledge and have many years of experience in understanding the hazards of these gases. They know how best to mitigate them – all with the goal of keeping everyone who comes into contact with these products as safe as possible. We recognize,…

We at the Compressed Gas Association are excited to announce the availability of new eLearning modules, which participating GAWDA members can access for free. These modules provide a modern training method for introducing basic safety information to new industry employees across a range of topics, including the safe handling of compressed gases, acetylene cylinders and cryogenic liquids in portable containers. First launched in 2011, the partnership between GAWDA and the Compressed Gas Association provides participating GAWDA distributor members with complimentary access to CGA’s electronic safety publication library (enabling one employee per company location to gain free access to CGA’s library…

In 2018, the Compressed Gas Association celebrated a number of regulatory successes, including the adoption of CGA recommended practices for GHS-compliant labeling, design aspects of cylinder and valve packages, requalification of manifolded cylinders and several other issues. As we look forward to 2019, there are several key areas of regulatory activity to monitor for impacts to our industry. We will continue to collaborate with our members, partner organizations like GAWDA, and our regulatory stakeholders to promote acceptance of industry positions on these issues and others that come up throughout the year. Consumer Safety As our industry’s products become more common…