Biffa Municipal Halves Health And Safety Incidents

20 May 2011

A year-long initiative to enhance safe working has seen the municipal division of recycling and energy-from-waste giant Biffa halve lost time incidents (LTIs), with some depots achieving and maintaining zero incident status

Biffa's concern with the dangers of working in the waste and recycling industry led the company's management to set a company-wide target of reducing LTIs by 50 percent during the year March 2010 to February 2011 - a continuation of the company's long-running focus on health and safety in the workplace.

Peter Elliott, health and safety manager for Biffa's municipal division, said the commitment and hard work of municipal division management, depots and staff helped the division meet its overall target. "Several depots had zero incidents for the second year running, while others only just missed the target. Everyone played their part in this important initiative, and must be congratulated for their efforts, both then and now."

He added that a new health and safety awareness drive is planned for the current year.

The municipal division, which at the time had nearly 1,000 staff working on 17 separate local council contracts, decided that manual handling and slips, trips and falls were its prime areas for attention, together with action on vehicle reversing, road risks, footwear, and incident identification, reporting and investigation.

Much of the division's work involves walking to and from collection vehicles and kerbsides, as well as handling loads such as wheeled bins, recycling boxes and sacks. It is estimated that an average working day will see a vehicle loader handle between seven and nine tonnes of waste, and walk up to 10 miles.

Working closely with the company's health and safety unit as well as external consultants, the division introduced training programmes to improve manual handling techniques, launched a new vehicle reversing policy and training, ensured staff wore the correct safety boots, enhanced staff ability to identify risks and near-misses and reporting, and improved incident investigation quality.

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Darrel Moore