These 59 enforcement notices covered 14 topics, the initiative found, with the most common involving: risk assessment and route risk assessment; bin lift safety; noise assessment and control; reversing assistant training; transport safety; and monitoring.
Launched in October 2010, the ‘Three-year intervention with local authority waste and recycling services’ initiative sought to assess the role of local authorities when procuring and managing municipal waste and recycling contracts, or delivering in-house waste and recycling services.
According to HSE, 50% of the local authorities inspected contracted out all or part of their waste and/or recycling services.
Guidelines
Half-way through the initiative in 2012, it was found that nearly one-fifth of local authorities were not following important health and safety guidelines when procuring waste and recycling contracts (see letsrecycle.com story)
A report and summary of the full initiative, for which inspections were completed in March 2014, are expected to be published online soon, although an HSE spokeswoman was unable to confirm a date.
However, ahead of this report, HM inspector of health and safety Janet Viney presented some of the findings of the three-year initiative to UK council recycling officers at the Local Authority Recycling and Advisory Committee (LARAC) 2014 conference in Nottingham last week (October 16).
According to Ms Viney, the initiative ran between October 2010 and March 2014, with 99.5% of relevant local authorities inspected during this period. Inspections were not completed of only two of the 380 relevant councils due to “ongoing investigations”.
Inspections were originally due to be completed in October 2013 but Ms Viney explained that due to “operational difficulties” surveys of all local authorities was not completed until March this year.
Overall, inspectors deemed 14% of local authorities to be non-compliant in relation to managing and procuring waste services as a whole, with councils generally performing better in ‘specification’ and ‘evaluation’ than in ‘management’ of the contract or service.
She also explained that the fatal accident rate for workers in waste and recycling is twice that of the construction sector, and nine times the average of all industries. Furthermore the majority of fatalities are transport-related.
Presenting the findings, she said: “You all know that waste and recycling has a bad record in terms of health and safety.”
TEEP
According to the HSE findings, 80% of all reportable accidents in waste and recycling involve collection and sorting activities, while the major injury causes are due to handling (42%) – largely causing issues such as muscular skeletal disorders and sprains.
Concerns were also raised among audience members during the presentation about recycling collection workers lifting recycling boxes and the potential for such an activity to cause back problems in future.
Wheeled bins are therefore more preferential in terms of health and safety, but EU rulings on separate collections and TEEP due to come into effect in 2015 would potentially favour the use of boxes over wheeled bins.
Asked whether the HSE could influence or lobby with regards to EU policy, Ms Viney said that this was not the job of the organisation: “We do comment but we cannot physically change or do anything about what another Directive is requiring.”
However, chair of the workshop session, LARAC policy officer Mark Foxall, added: “Health and safety must really override the EU regulations.”
Improvements
Since the half-way point of the initiative, Ms Viney highlighted improvements, such as a 13% increase in the provision and wearing of personal protective equipment (PPE).
And, according to an HSE questionnaire sent to councils, the 60% of councils said their accident rates had dropped since the initiative started, while 31% said identified that their sickness rate had dropped.
75% of respondents to another HSE questionnaire sent to council contractors said they have tendered for new waste and recycling contracts since the initiative began. Furthermore, 81% of respondents the respondents to the contractor survey said the initiative had changed the way local authorities monitor their health and safety performance.
HSE now intends to repeat the three-year programme of inspection interventions with local authority waste and recycling collection services, starting in 2015/16.
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