Landfill Insights | Connecting the dots: Policy to practice

Every organization should have a safety plan and an operations plan. Your office shelf likely contains copies of those plans.

Chances are those plans were written with the best of intentions. Maybe they were prepared by the operations staff, a safety manager or the HR department. Maybe you wrote them. Or perhaps they were written by an outside consultant. Regardless of their origin, someone put a lot of thought and effort into those plans.

Having those plans on the shelf puts you in compliance with federal, state and organizational requirements as well as with industry expectations. Kudos to you.

You have those plans. So what? Then what?

Did you ever wonder if the captain of the Titanic had a plan? In fact, he did. He had a route plan from Southampton, England, to New York. He also had detailed navigation charts and a schedule. Yet we all know that simply having those plans didn’t cut the mustard.

From the standpoint of compliance, having safety and operational plans is the first step. But there is more to the equation.

Additional steps—critical steps—are required to keep your crew working safely and efficiently. Here’s a rundown on how to get there.

From page to practice

First off, your safety and operations plans must have good, relevant content. Your crew will know immediately if those plans apply to their jobs or if you’re just checking a box. For the Titanic, instead of trying to set a new time record, perhaps something more applicable would have been appropriate, such as establishing an SOP, or standard operating procedure, that says to slow down if icebergs are nearby.

There’s more similarity here than you might think.

When’s the last time a truck or tractor backed into something at your facility? It’s interesting to note that drivers and operators don’t back into things they can see but into things they don’t see. Maybe something more applicable would be appropriate, like an SOP that says if other workers or vehicles are nearby, slow down.

Plans that were created in an ivory tower by someone who doesn’t know a front-loader from a wheel loader, or a roll-off container from a wheelie bin, are unlikely to help your crew work safely and efficiently. I’m not casting blame here, but how can someone write an operations plan or safety plan if they don’t know the process or understand the risks?

I’ve frequently conducted a brief but telling analysis to see how well a plan applies to a specific facility or operation. You can do the same thing.

To evaluate your safety plan, start by listing recent incidents, accidents or near misses. They could include backing accidents, machine or truck roll-overs, injuries from blowing trash, fueling spills or property damage that happened on a collections route.

For the operations plan, jot down the most important activities performed at your facility. For a landfill or transfer station, these activities might include directing customer vehicles, managing household hazardous waste, pushing trash, loading transfer trucks, constructing a daily cell, compacting waste or managing the vehicle unloading area.

Then, pull up the associated plan on your computer and run a series of word searches based on your site-specific lists. Look for keywords related to your operation, such as bulldozer, landfill compactor, wheel loader, cleanout area, spotter, vehicle spacing, litter, leachate, landfill gas, backing, blind spots, traffic director, pedestrian safety or overhead obstructions.

The goal is to see how closely your safety and operations plans correspond to your operations. This can provide a revealing look into those plans. It might even be embarrassing. It’s not unusual for safety and operations plans to have lots of general and academic language about safety or operations and nothing specific that addresses those risks and challenges your workers face every day.

If you determine that your safety and operations plans are relevant to your operation, congratulations! You are at the top of the class. However, there’s a good chance you’ll find those plans to be heavy on generic language but very light on specific guidance.

Yet this simple analysis will tell you if your safety and operations plans are applicable and useful or not.

Translate for front-line workers

For the next step, after you affirm your plan is good, or after you create one that is, translate that plan to the folks who are doing the work. They are the ones who drive the trucks, operate the bulldozers, direct traffic or sort waste or recyclables. Those plans were developed for your workers, and it’s vital that they receive useful benefits from them.

To translate that information to the front lines, you’ll need to communicate in terms your workers will understand. Explaining the risks of bloodborne pathogen exposure nurses face at a medical facility is useless. But telling them how to recognize and avoid exposure to medical sharps while cleaning out their route truck or removing trash from the dozer’s engine compartment offers them real solutions for real issues.

What we’re talking about here is creating a culture within your organization that is efficient and safety-minded. That requires you to translate the why and how of those plans to your crew and to do it often. As they say, practice makes perfect, but repetition makes it stick.

If you don’t know for sure that your policies are being effectively translated to your front-line workers, they probably aren’t. So, before you start another new and exciting program, take time to affirm that your existing policies are being properly implemented.

Neal Bolton is president of Blue Ridge Services Montana Inc. He has been improving solid waste operations for more than 48 years. You can contact Neal at neal@blueridgeservices.com.