We're all probably familiar with the saying about how if you watch for the little things, the big things take care of themselves. Well that's true in injury prevention, too.
As Steve Toloken writes, the National Safety Council's Work to Zero 2050 initiative focuses not just on the incidents that cause injuries, but the near misses that could have been much worse.
NSC said that for every major workplace injury, there are 29 minor injuries and 300 incidents that didn't result in injuries but could have.
"If organizations focus on preventing the noninjury incidents, then the minor and major injuries will decrease as well," NSC said in its February "Safety Technology 2020" report, issued as part of the initiative.
So that means keeping track of slipups such as a failure to follow lockout/tag-out rules.
The good news is that injury rates are down in the plastics industry, but smaller companies typically lag behind larger firms in safety, perhaps because they lack the funding to have full-time safety officers. But that doesn't mean there aren't little things they can do. Check out Steve's report for more details.