Stephen Freeland, SESA policy advisor, outlines the ESA’s work with the Health & Safety Executive to help ensure that risks are identified, minimised or designed out completely, saying it will work to obtain more granular data on the sector’s performance…
The waste and recycling industry is perhaps one of the most complex and diverse of all the UK’s industrial sectors. The industry encompasses a wide range of facilities and operations with everything from highly specialised, process-based installations (such as energy from waste, gasification and anaerobic digestion) to more manual and labour intensive sorting of mixed recyclables in both material recovery facilities and through collection activities.
Furthermore, a whole host of players within the industry provide waste collection services to the UK’s homes and business, which adds an additional layer of complexity. These include local authorities, the private sector (ESA and non-ESA Members), the third sector, SMEs and others.
Such diversity by no means excuses poor health and safety performance but offers some contextual background to the challenges faced by those organisations which are seeking to make step change improvements.
The key objective for our industry is to ensure that risks are identified, minimised or designed out completely. Working closely with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), ESA is aiming to achieve just that. As the industry continues to mature, more innovative approaches to risk assessment are increasingly being accompanied by a more holistic approach to health and safety.
Through WISH there have been good examples of partnership working and with HSE working constructively with the industry to produce guidance documents. HSE’s continued endorsement of such helps extend the influence of WISH guidance right across the industry.
Examples include the adoption of behavioural safety initiatives and programmes which broaden the scope of health and safety beyond traditional areas (such as physical safety) to support development of stronger health and safety cultures within organisations, which help keep people safe and improve well being.
Successful deployment of such are assisted, in part, by an open and non-competitive approach to health and safety which has allowed the sharing of best practice across the industry and the compilation of a broad range of resource and guidance documents.
Many initiatives such as these have been pursued through the Waste Industry Safety & Health (WISH) Forum – a committee formed of representatives from different sectors across the waste and recycling industry. It serves as a forum for the exchange of information and to discuss and resolve prevailing health and safety issues.
Through WISH there have been good examples of partnership working and with HSE working constructively with the industry to produce guidance documents. HSE’s continued endorsement of such helps extend the influence of WISH guidance right across the industry.
HSE has also rolled out a programme of targeted inspections of the waste and recycling industry over a number of years now, which has included head office-level engagement with a number of companies party to HSE’s National Lead Inspector (NLI) Initiative. NLI has provided a platform for HSE to engage with large waste management operators to help improve the two-way flow of information and to allow for the dissemination of best practice deployed within those companies.
HSE’s waste sector plan, the objectives of which were supported by the industry, identifies the areas where the industry has the greatest potential for harm and sets out points for action. The plan is a useful starting point and a partnership approach is required to ensure relevant actions and objectives are taken forward and delivered by all parties involved in the sector. The industry is ready to help make a success of the plan but also looks to the HSE to continue working in partnership in this regard.
ESA looks forward to working with HSE, WISH and others to ensure that progress towards higher rates of recycling is matched with equally high standards in health and safety. Action will be required on many fronts, including a joint, concerted effort to engaging SMEs in the health and safety agenda.
Designing in health and safety into the public procurement process is another key area to help ensure that public waste management contracts are compatible with health and safety outcomes. Of course, reliable health and safety data is a common theme to all this work and ESA will work with HSE to obtain more granular data on our industry’s performance which could be used to help support development of guidance and target resources on greatest area of risk.