Ensuring safety

In September, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its annual update on fatalities by industry, ranking the waste and recycling sector as the fifth most dangerous industry.

Recycling and waste processing face a host of challenges that have the potential to compromise safety if a comprehensive approach to best safety practices is not adopted. Some of our challenges include working with heavy and complex machinery, sorting through an array of items that consumers don’t always dispose of properly and moving quickly in a busy environment.

With that, the National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA) and its members nationwide have made safety the very top priority for our industry. Our members are committed to keeping workers safe and ensuring that they go home each and every night to their families. As one of our organization’s top strategic initiatives for the next three years, we are working across our industry to share best practices, promote education and provide resources that help to train workers and increase safety across the board.

Addressing the issue of safety has called for innovation. New technologies allow us to be more protective of workers and to prevent accidents through comprehensive training and education. This is happening across the board in communities and behind the scenes in material recovery facilities (MRFs).
 

Protecting the visible and the invisible

While a great deal of our work has focused on safe drivers and protecting workers in the field, we also work with our members to ensure safety for a group of workers that are less visible to the general public—in fact, most consumers probably don’t think about the role that individuals play behind the scenes once waste and recyclables are collected from their homes and hauled away. This is the proud corps of workers who sort and process recyclables at MRFs. At the more than 560 MRFs nationwide, a combination of manual sorting, screens, magnets and optical sorters separate materials so they can be sent to market. Workers are spread at stations throughout a MRF complex, and a consistent stream of vehicular traffic is coming and going throughout the day.

When the MRF receives recyclables from haulers, the material is loaded onto conveyors. One of the first sorts is to remove materials that are not recyclable: They could be garden hoses or umbrellas or even used diapers. But, more importantly, the materials improperly disposed of by the general public can be very dangerous, such as used needles that must be removed by the men and women working on sort lines, posing health risks to workers.

It’s important for the general public to understand that safety at a MRF is a shared responsibility—they have important roles to play in this. Disposing of items correctly and in a hygienic fashion is an important step in improving safety at a MRF.
 

Taking responsibility

Beyond the public’s role in MRF safety, we know that solid waste employers and employees must do their parts to operate these facilities with safety in mind.

Some important guidelines that all MRF workers need to take into account to ensure their safety include:

• PPE (personal protective equipment), such as high visibility clothing, hard hats, safety glasses, gloves and protective shoes, should be worn at all times.
• Lockout/tagout procedures should be followed at all times.
• Bale integrity, height and distance from employees should be taken into account when storing bales.
• All machine guards and interlocks must be in place and functional at all times.
• Housekeeping should be used to control dust and slip/fall hazards and should take efforts to prohibit scavenging.
• Emergency exits must be clearly marked and unobstructed.
• Checks and balances should be in place and employees should be periodically observed to make sure they are working in compliance with a facility’s safety rules to reduce the likelihood of an accident or injury.
• When temporary workers are on-site at a MRF, ensure they also have the proper safety orientation, training and equipment to do their jobs safely.
   

Offering assistance

Keeping up with these practices requires significant discipline and vigilance. As an association, we work to make this easier for members to accomplish. We serve as the secretariat for the American National Standards Institute for Z245 standards for equipment, technology and operations for the waste and recyclable industry, developing safety standards for the waste and recycling industry, including those for landfills, transfer stations and MRFs. We engage industry experts to regularly discuss needs, concerns and successes in MRF safety. Additionally, our Manual of Recommended Safety Practices serves as a resource for fundamental safety best practices for MRF operators and workers.

It is the responsibility of all stakeholders to uphold the very best in safety protocols, procedures, regulations, standards and performance. These safety practices are not only encouraged by our members—we demand and expect them.

Together with our partners, the NWRA constantly reviews and assesses safety issues among our members and benchmarks them against similar industries that face many of the same safety challenges. Our data-driven approach to developing safety education and training programs facilitates a valuable dialogue that promotes a safer work environment for our workers and safer roadways in our communities.

Our member companies take safety seriously. Most have safety managers and work tirelessly to send crews out daily who return to the yard safely without incident. We responsibly operate heavy equipment in some of the world’s most densely populated cities.

In addition to the obvious consequences of accidents, there is one large and often overlooked aftereffect: Accidents are expensive. Companies with poor safety records suffer from extremely high insurance and workers’ compensation rates. These costs strongly penalize unsafe operators in an industry with small profit margins. Companies with poor safety records either change their ways quickly or are forced out of business by skyrocketing costs.

For those businesses that operate below the strong and high standards we have set for ourselves, we offer tools and resources to help remediate their pitfalls, but we also do our best to let them know that we won’t stand for any irresponsible actions. We know that the actions of one bad apple can broadly affect our industry, so we take it upon ourselves to hold one another accountable because when it comes to safety, we put our competitive differences aside for a greater cause.

Our efforts are focused on making trash and recycling collection, processing and disposal operations as safe as possible by encouraging awareness, safety training, compliance with regulations, standards and company safety rules and policies. We do so because it is literally a matter of life and death.

This article was submitted by the National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA), Washington, an organization providing leadership, advocacy, research, education and safety expertise for the waste and recycling industries. More information is available from the NWRA through its website at http://wasterecycling.org.