Target #5: Our people #homesafe and healthy at work, every day!
09 December 2020
The health and safety of all Renewi employees has always been our most important priority. That’s why we have always set, and continue to set, ambitious safety targets. This has been a challenging year for us, because serious accidents occurred at Renewi sites. However, we made progress with our near-miss reporting and closeout rates, and our new HomeSafe initiative aims to raise our people’s risk awareness. We are also confident that we will achieve success with the company’s headline safety metric: the greaterthan-three-day accident rate.
Performance
Although the total number of accidents with more than three days’ absence has dropped 3% from 98 to 95, the greater-than-three-day accident rate, which is the 12-month rolling rate per number of FTEs, increased. However, the general lost-time injury frequency rate did decrease significantly, which shows that our efforts to reduce the average number of accidents per employee are paying off. A continuing matter of concern is the severity rate, which again changed negatively. This means that the absence as an effect of the injuries our people suffer has risen, urging us to continue our journey to raise safety awareness and to increasingly shield our people from the dangers around them. A positive development has been near-miss reporting. This year we have reported more than 29,898 near-misses – a 67% rise; at the same time we have increased the close-out rate by 11% to a total of 80%.
Conclusion and outlook
Renewi is all about new beginnings. Our HomeSafe campaign, which started this year, is a new beginning for our SHEQ (safety, health, environment and quality) efforts. It’s a move away from traditional methods of solely tracking accident rates and incident numbers; it emphasises potential reporting hazards and closing them out as a team. By doing this, we are raising risk perception and closing out minor events before they turn into a major situation. We also have a new global system that gives every employee the ability to report any incident instantaneously. We are disappointed that we weren’t able to achieve all of our ambitious 2020 objective targets. We do, however, see improvements in our fundamental approach to safety, which convinces us that we are also going to see improvement in our greater-than-three-day accident rate over the coming years. For this reason, our long-term ambition – to reduce our accident level across the business to ‘zero accidents’, not merely to an ‘acceptable level’ – still stands. Taking our people with us on our safety journey ensures that we are very much heading in the right direction.