For the last six years, Sirutiina Hakulinen has worked at Nor-Maali as a Product Safety Engineer. She landed her current job through previous summer jobs in the factory. “Since 2006 every summer job I had was at Nor-Maali. Through these summer jobs, my interest in the field grew and I set off to study Chemical Engineering in Tampere. Few years after my graduation I got a permanent position as a Product Safety Engineer.”
“As a Product Safety Engineer I am responsible for our product safety data sheets and trough that our label information as well. I maintain our company’s chemical register through a specialized software, which contains all Safety Data Sheets for the finished coating products and the raw materials used in them. Finished products include all of our own Nor-Maali products, Jotun’s licensing and purchasing products and other licensed products. I also do risk assessments for used chemicals.”
“Each month, I keep track of production volume, which is needed once a year for Finnish Safety and Chemicals Agency (Tukes) report of production quantities per tonne. In addition, I go through all the updates in Jotun Safety Data Sheets. Different projects take a lot of time as well. Now we have a project on Finnish KemiDigi product register. In the future, we have projects for mixture exposure scenarios and poison centre notifications.
When our customers apply for an environmental permit and the audits regarding it they need lists of chemicals used in our products and VOC emission reports, they are part of the customer support tasks I have. Because the market we serve is not based in Finland alone, I update the Swedish (KEMI) and Denmark chemical product register according to our exported products. I work also as the safety adviser for transporting dangerous goods.”
Sirutiina is one-half of a two-person HSEQ department that works closely together. Each of them have clearly their own work tasks and areas so both work very independently. Different kinds of trainings for employees are planned and held together. There is a lot of collaborative work with different departments of Nor-Maali, as the raw material and product safety information has to be communicated with laboratory and purchasing, for example. Through these departments, Sirutiina gets the latest information of new raw materials, their updated Safety Data Sheets and possible recipe changes to our products.
“I really like my work. Weekly and daily tasks go much by routine already, but different projects and trainings bring nice variability. The only tedious part is that sometimes the workload can get large, if there are many different tasks and projects at the same time. In the end, my work is a pleasant one and it is exactly what I want to do.”