November/December 2015> ReMA's Circle of Safety Excellence initiative marks its first year of promoting higher safety standards in the scrap recycling industry.
By Megan Quinn
Every few months it seemed there was more bad news that weighed down scrap recyclers’ already-heavy hearts: A worker was injured after being hit by a truck or killed after being struck by a forklift. Others died in vehicle accidents while not wearing seat belts or were killed after inhaling fumes in enclosed spaces. As word spread about new injuries and deaths, the question lingered: What can we do to change?
Out of that question came the Circle of Safety Excellence™, a program that takes a new approach to improving worker safety in the recycling industry. ReMA established the circle in 2014 to bring together companies that want to improve their safety performance. Circle members voluntarily share and compare aggregated injury data and exchange ideas about best practices. In the year since the initiative started, some recyclers “inside the circle” report using the information to improve their safety programs, while others have offered mentoring and advice to help their peers improve.
“All these companies have banded together to share their [best] practices, their failures. That’s beneficial for us and for me as a safety manager because it gives me insight on how to prevent [problems] in my own yard,” says Amanda Wallace, logistics coordinator and safety manager for Brick Recycling (Brick, N.J.), one of the first companies to join.
The Circle’s Beginnings
Though ReMA officially established the circle in 2014, the idea started to form about a year earlier, when members of an ReMA safety working group—which Jerry Simms of Atlas Metal & Iron Corp. (Denver), then ISRI’s chair, led—began brainstorming new safety initiatives. The idea was to gather together a group of ReMA members who could present their well-run safety programs as good examples that would inspire their colleagues in the industry to step up their own safety performance. In turn, those well-run operations could learn from each other and become even better at keeping employees safe on the job, says Howard Glick, president of Tri-State Iron & Metal Co. (Texarkana, Ark.).
A steering committee for the Circle of Safety Excellence grew from those early discussions, says Glick, one of the committee members. The committee “took the best of the best, the ones that were [most] committed, … and created a group of safety-minded companies” that could share ideas with each other and use their expertise to help other companies, he says.
The circle launched in fall 2014, and it attracted 61 charter members by the end of that year. In the first six months of 2015, 29 more companies joined. Circle member companies, which represent 804 facilities, include small recycling businesses with fewer than 50 employees as well as large, multinational companies with more than a thousand workers. About 6 percent of ReMA members are part of the circle.
To join the circle, ReMA member companies must demonstrate their safety chops by providing to ReMA four years of the injury data they report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including their lost-time injury frequency rate; days away, restricted work activity, or job transfer rate; total case injury rate; and Compliance, Safety, Accountability data tracked through the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (if the company has a truck fleet). Applicants also must demonstrate that they have specific safety management programs, agree to continuous safety improvement, and actively reach out to others in the industry to promote safe practices.
Collaboration, Not Competition
Once a company joins the circle, its safety becomes a team effort and a shared responsibility, says Scott Miller, chair of the circle’s steering committee. Circle members agree that safety techniques are not trade secrets, he says. Even if members might be competitors in the business world, they all want a safer workplace. “It’s an industrywide understanding. The one area where we don’t compete is safety,” he says.
Miller, who is chief corporate counsel (safety, health, environment, and community and compliance) for Sims Metal Management (New York), says it made sense for his company to become part of the circle. Safety is the No. 1 priority at all Sims locations around the world, he says, and the company has been refining and improving its safety protocols for years. He thought the company could offer some perspective and mentor other companies. “We wanted to contribute to that [effort] any way we could,” he says.
Wallace of Brick Recycling says the company is “thrilled” to be part of the circle because it wants to take advantage of the group’s collective knowledge. Being in the circle has helped her implement new and creative ideas, she says. At one meeting, a member shared the idea of incentivizing safety to get employees involved, for example. Wallace says she used that idea to start a “hazard hunt” in the scrapyard, where workers spend the first few minutes of their shift walking around to spot situations or equipment that might pose a safety problem. Participating employees can earn gift cards for their efforts. Although Brick Recycling already had regular safety meetings, Wallace says it’s important to find engaging ways to reinforce safety measures and invite employees to actively feel they have the power to prevent accidents. “We want to get them involved and excited,” she says.
Wallace also says the circle has helped her learn about other companies’ safety mantras, and she has applied a few of those to her company. One valuable phrase she picked up from circle members is, “If you mess up, fess up.” As she explains, “Undisclosed issues can turn into bigger problems.”
Gathering Meaningful Data
Another major component of the circle is sharing aggregated injury data. Members of the steering committee wanted ReMA to collect more specific data about the recycling industry’s injury and fatality rates, whether the injuries happen in the scrapyard or as part of a work-related vehicle accident. Businesses already report most of that information to OSHA (or the Department of Transportation for a reportable vehicle crash), but they had been reluctant to share that information with their peers due to privacy concerns, Miller says. That also made it difficult for industry peers to learn from others’ mistakes. “Companies didn’t want to feel embarrassed if their injury statistics were higher than their peers,” he says.
the initiative collects will stay confidential and will only be used in the aggregate for benchmarking purposes. No one can trace back a data point to a specific company, and the benchmarking numbers are available only to those inside the circle. “Confidentiality was essential” to raising interest in the initiative, Miller says.
While there are several ways to find OSHA and FMCSA data on injuries and fatalities, much of the data encompasses both the recycling and the solid waste industries, which makes it difficult to get an accurate picture of what’s actually going on with scrap recyclers, Glick says. For example, the recycling industry is commonly cited as one of the most deadly in the United States. An October report from the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the industry had 27 fatalities in 2014, down from 33 in 2013. Yet the fatal work injury rate, which is based on the number of deaths per 100,000 full-time workers, rose from 33.0 in 2013 to 35.8 in 2014, making the industry the fifth-deadliest in the United States, BLS says. That’s an important statistic, but it can be misleading because it applies to a broad list of jobs, not just recycling jobs, Glick says.
Wallace says that statistic is alarming, and it is one of the reasons Brick Recycling joined the circle. She hopes circle members together can help turn around the troubling trend. She also will look at the data the circle generates to compare industry benchmarks with the safety data Brick collects “to see where we stand and where we need to get to.”
Other entities do collect safety data just on recyclers, but the information they collect doesn’t cover the same territory that the circle does. For example, Willis Programs (Portsmouth, N.H.) underwrites RecycleGuard®, the ISRI-sponsored insurance program. Dan Curran, the company’s senior vice president and underwriting officer, says RecycleGuard collects data related to policyholder property, equipment breakdown, and inland marine, automobile, and general liability insurance. Some of that information includes injury data, but some injuries that result in claims may not be reportable to OSHA and therefore wouldn’t show up in the circle’s aggregated data, he says. For example, RecycleGuard notes insurance losses if a peddler, vendor, or other nonemployee visitor is injured while visiting a scrapyard, but that data is not reportable to OSHA, he says.
Curran says RecycleGuard already was sharing anonymized data with ReMA before the Circle of Safety Excellence program started for setting “benchmarks, identifying industry trends, and allocation of safety resources,” he says. Now that the circle has collected one round of its own benchmarking data, it is another way to evaluate trends.
Though the circle, BLS, and RecycleGuard collect safety data differently, Curran says each set of numbers still underscores an undeniable fact: “The scrap industry is a high-hazard industry.” Collecting information is important to inform industry leaders about safety problems, but it’s even more important to do something with that knowledge, he says. “Implementing a culture of safety and implementing safe business practices is the most important step,” he says.
Widening the Circle
Miller says one of the steering committee’s goals is to motivate every ReMA member who operates a scrap facility to join the circle. Current members help spread the word, he says, and some see the circle as a way to motivate those who do not yet meet the requirements but are interested in improving their operations. That motivation is a major part of the program, John Gilstrap, ISRI’s former director of safety, once wrote in the “Safety First” column in Scrap. “The circle is the cool kids’ table in the industry’s cafeteria.”
Glick says it is still a challenge to convince potential members to step into the circle, especially those that are not yet able to meet all the requirements of circle membership. Because the existing members are already so safety-focused, the program might be
seen as preaching to the choir, he says.
Another challenge, some circle members say, is initiating and maintaining the changes needed to make the industry safer. Circle membership takes a great deal of motivation, and it’s up to existing members to help nonmembers find their particular motivations for improving safety above and beyond what they are already doing. “Our goal is to persuade [people who are not circle members] that this is important, whether they look at the human cost, the financial cost, or whatever triggers them,” Glick says.
ISRI Chair Doug Kramer of Kramer Metals (Los Angeles), in a letter to members announcing the Circle of Safety Excellence initiative, said changing daily habits is a challenge, but this “is where safety resides—
at the intersection of change and motivation.”
It can be a major investment of time and energy to improve existing safety programs, but it pays off in the end, Glick says. Joining the circle not only will make your company safer, he maintains, but it also will improve your employee morale and possibly reduce your insurance premiums.
Miller says current circle members will continue to report data and share insights so everyone in the circle is constantly motivated to improve. Members will meet periodically and will participate in conference calls and webinars to stay up to date. “We’re in this for the long run,” he says. “We’re not looking for immediate fixes or cures because that doesn’t seem to be the way safety culture evolves in a company. It takes time and effort and commitment.”
Megan Quinn is reporter/writer for Scrap.