Waste-Handling Injuries: What We Can Learn from OSHA Injury Reports
This guest blog is courtesy of the Solus Group.
There’s good news and bad news for safety advocates in the waste-handling industry.
First, the good news. Fatalities for refuse and recycling collectors declined to a rate of 34.1 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers in 2016. This halted a troubling rise that began in 2012 and peaked at a rate of 38.8 injuries per 100,000 workers in 2015.
Nonfatal injury and illness rates for solid waste collectors also dipped slightly around that time, from 5.2 injuries per 100 workers in 2016 to 5.1 in 2017. Analysts credit this trend as the result of aggressive safety programs surrounding waste-collectors, driven by the job’s standing as the fifth-most dangerous occupation in the U.S.
Now the bad news. While we’ve seen incremental safety improvements in…