Safety First: A Great Start

Those who weren’t there missed something big. Huge.
   On Oct. 18-19, 2005, 80 safety professionals from the scrap recycling industry gathered in a room at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Chicago and vetted a full range of safety and health issues. Eighty! Truth be told, I thought I was going out on a limb all those months ago when I told the powers that be that we might attract half that number.
   As the organizer, I’m probably not the best judge of such things, but from where I sat (stood, actually, for most of it), the conference met or exceeded most attendees’ expectations.

Wide Diversity
The companies represented at the inaugural meeting of the ReMA National Safety Committee crossed a wide spectrum of size and complexity. Some of the big players sent more than one person to the meeting, but we had a comforting number of single-owner, single-site smaller yards represented as well. At the shallow end of the experience pool, we had one safety coordinator who had been in his job for less than a week. On the far corner of the deep end, there was one attendee with 35 years in safety, a good chunk of them in the scrap business. Like bell curves everywhere, the vast majority fell in the middle, with probably two-thirds raising their hands to calls of “five-to-10 years” and “more than 10 years.”
   Diversity notwithstanding, there was a common purpose to this meeting, and with that purpose, a common commitment to making the scrap recycling industry safer than many of the attendees’ bosses believe it can be.

Under a Pall
The meeting of safety professionals came at the perfect time for our industry, just weeks after the Bureau of Labor Statistics combined the refuse and scrap industries in the same statistical column to proclaim us fifth in the list of Top 10 Most Dangerous Businesses, as measured solely by worker fatalities. One shudders to think what might have been the result of adding nonfatal injuries into the mix.
   At the Hyatt, for two consecutive days, 80 professionals focused centuries of cumulative expertise on the task of erasing that humiliating statistic from the record books. If there was common agreement on any single point, it was on the belief that our business need not be inherently dangerous.

A Recurring Pattern
The only inherent dangers that exist are those we either create or tolerate.
   Over and over again, throughout the days of discussion—whether it was about fall protection on trucks and railcars, or driver training, or peddler and visitor control—daunting safety challenges followed the same discussion arc:
• There’s no practical, workable solution to this problem;
• General agreement that the problem is nagging, unrelenting, and ultimately unsolvable; then
• Someone says, “We used to feel that way until a worker got seriously injured, then we fixed the problem by...”
Honestly, I lost count of the number of times the discussion followed the same pathway. So many things seem impossible until there’s no choice, and then the solutions come quickly. It’s troubling that the portal to exit the circular argument is so often marked by a blood smear. It would be so much simpler if we just paid attention to the obvious hazard and fixed it before any actual maiming occurred. 
   Our focus for the future, then, is to devise strategies for defusing the ticking bombs of our industry. We’re going to share solutions we’ve found and seek solutions that evade us. We’re going to get companies to talk with each other about safety—the one area where competitive juices must be stilled for the common good.
   We’ve already taken a giant step forward. Just look at the safety communities on the ReMA Web site. The sharing has begun. This is exciting stuff.
   Eighty is a wonderful attendance number. It’s a spectacular beginning. Now there are only 1,211 ReMA members left to be recruited. 

(To subscribe to ISRI’s online safety community, send an e-mail to tanishiamartin@isri.org or call 202/662-8539.) 

—John Gilstrap, ReMA Director of Safety