Developing strong safety cultures in academic institutions requires that students at all levels be educated by faculty in chemical safety. Yet chemical safety education is missing from the chemistry curriculum. This article considers a report of numerous injuries from incidents from using flammable chemicals in demonstrations as evidence that chemical safety education is needed in the academic curriculum. It offers reasons why chemical safety education should become an integral part of the chemistry curriculum. It offers elements of a chemical safety education with references to materials that can be helpful in accomplishing this process. This article notes that it is important to reach students early in the first and second years of chemistry since many will go on to other vocations for which an understanding of chemical safety is needed. It concludes that a strong safety culture in an academic institution can be accomplished when chemical safety education is included in the curriculum.

Chemical safety is a discipline that cuts across all other chemical disciplines and also impacts other laboratory sciences. It is an essential part of chemistry and continues to evolve with the science it supports. This paper provides a short background about ACS's growing involvement with chemical safety education that stems from support from ACS leadership of passionate efforts of volunteers collaborating across many ACS organizations to develop chemical safety resources. ACS provides many chemical safety resources and programs to assist with nearly every aspect of chemical education in support of integration of safety in chemistry curricula, research, and outreach activities. This paper includes a listing of many chemical safety resources available from the ACS at little or no cost. The table of resources identifies the documents (some are printed), their electronic location on the ACS website, their intended audience, the ACS organization that developed the resource, an annotated description of the resource, and the year the current version was published. A glimpse of ongoing chemical safety products under development by ACS and its volunteers is also provided.