Losses of another kind

Profits and losses are what determine the long-term viability of a recycling enterprise or any other type of business operating in North America. Therefore, Recycling Today focuses a healthy percentage of its attention to the supply, demand, processing and pricing trends that affect balance sheets.

Losses of another kind have been making their way into the recycling-related news gathering process all too often in 2016—the loss of lives or limbs to on-the-job accidents.

A number of factors combine to make the recycling and waste industry an unsafe sector: processing machinery with fast-moving parts, the collection of materials along busy streets and highways and the presence of moving vehicles and mobile material handling equipment in what can be a noisy and hectic environment.

Two of the industry’s leading trade organizations, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) and the National Waste and Recycling Association (NWRA), each have expanded their safety outreach and education programs in the last several years in recognition of the dangers.

The advice and materials offered by the two groups have doubtless prevented accidents and saved lives. Nonetheless, the waste and recycling industry appears to be on course to have the dubious distinction of being one of the deadliest sectors again in 2016.

In the first four months of the year, one worker has died at a Nebraska recycling plant, a collection route worker was crushed in a compactor truck in Texas and a landfill worker in New York was killed by a moving truck.

At the ISRI 2016 Convention & Exposition in Las Vegas in early April, the compliance and safety manager for a scrap firm in the eastern United States told me he is all too aware that in the strictest sense the aspects he manages end up costing his company money, not earning revenue.

He said his challenges most often lie not on the budgeting side, however, but in convincing managers they must be absolutists in setting examples, such as by wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) in the right way and in all the appropriate areas of a facility.

Presentations made at previous ISRI conferences and at other industry events make it all too clear that when a fatality or catastrophic injury occurs at a workplace, it instantly changes the way the company involved views safety. Regret is a strong motivator, but ideally it is one that will not become too commonplace throughout the rest of 2016.