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Occupational Health: Workplace Chemical Exposure Risk Profile

The Chemicals in Workplace dashboard displays the chemicals that workers in different industries are potentially exposed to while working. It also shows the industries at risk. You can zoom in or zoom out (with the substance ranking filter) to select the number of chemicals or industries you want to visualize. Due to the cancer-causing risk of some of the chemicals, the carcinogenic group filter was created to visualize the chemicals or industries by the levels of classifications of the cancer-causing risk.

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How to navigate the Chemicals in the Workplace dashboard

By default you'll see the chemicals most frequently detected during Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA) inspections. From the default view, you can:

  • Use the drop-down menus to narrow your view.
  • Slide the Substance Ranking to zoom in and out on the data. For example, moving the two arrows to positions 1 and 10 would show the top 10 most commonly detected chemicals.
  • Use the health effect filter to select a specific health effect to view. Health effect (HE) is defined as the principal effect(s) of the exposure to the chemical or substance on the body. Once a health effect is selected, the filter next to it will be automatically updated to the name selected and you can use the drop-down menu to pick one of the three options (Yes, No, or No documentation).

Note: This dashboard uses all available federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data (not just data from Wisconsin).

Chemicals in the Workplace dashboard

*An asterisk on this dashboard means there no data were available. For example, Crystalline Silica does not have any synonyms, so the tooltip reads: "Crystalline Silica also known as *, which was ranked..."

Note on these data: OSHA compliance officers often take and analyze samples when monitoring worker exposures to chemical hazards. The information in this dashboard is based on the data OSHA collects in the course of those investigations. These data do not include ongoing investigations or open citations. See the technical notes section (below) to understand how and why data are selected.

See also: OSHA's Chemical Exposure Health Data.

More information about chemicals

This section provides information about some key chemicals in the data, and links to information on many more occupational chemicals.

Suggested citation: Wisconsin Dept. of Health Services, Division of Public Health, Office of Health Informatics and Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Health. Chemicals In the Workplace Dashboard, accessed MM/DD/YYYY.

Last revised February 3, 2025