Kickstart: A feather in your safety cap

With head injuries accounting for 6 percent of nonfatal workplace injuries, OSHA is urging companies to move away from traditional hard hats and toward more modern safety helmets.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said Dec. 11 it's replacing the traditional hard hats its employees use on inspection sites with more versatile and functional models.

In a detailed bulletin, the agency said traditional hard hats are often made with hard plastics like HDPE, but it said the more modern versions combine lightweight composites, fiberglass and advanced thermoplastics.

The agency's bulletin listed eight types of jobs where companies should consider using more modern safety helmets, including in the construction and oil and gas industries, as well as more specialized work environments where it said face shields, hearing protection or communications devices built into the helmets could prove vital.

"The significance of head protection in hazardous work environments cannot be overstated," the agency said.

OSHA has been making the rounds of some industries advocating for better headgear. In June, for example, it talked about a safety helmet pilot program at a meeting of the National Association of Home Builders.

That could be a subhead to a series of plastics-themed letters to the editor in the New York Times Dec. 11, including dueling commentary from the CEO of the Plastics Industry Association and the head of the group Beyond Plastics.

They were reacting to a Nov. 29 op-ed in the paper on the challenges and hopes of recycling, titled "I'm Appalled by What I Learned About Recycling. But We Can Fix It."

Plastics association CEO Matt Seaholm's response letter notes that the op-ed mentions the industry's $1 million "Recycling Is Real" advertising campaign and calls recycling "the best option to keep waste out of our landfills."

Seaholm says the industry wants to combat misinformation about recycling, is working hard to improve recycling, is making investments and needs supportive public policy like better recycling infrastructure.

On the other hand, the companion letter in the series from Judith Enck, the head of Beyond Plastics, argues that while recycling is important for many materials, plastics recycling has too many problems to be considered a viable solution. She argues what's needed is to make and use less plastic.

And a third letter in the series, from an executive at ReLoop North America, argues for more bottle bills as a proven way to raise container recycling rates for all types of bottles.

For me, the back-and-forth reminded me of commentary I'd seen recently about the industry's Recycling Is Real campaign from the Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers, a group of nonprofit material recovery facilities that process recyclables collected by communities.

AMBR agrees that recycling is real, but then it pointedly argues that "plastic is trashing recycling."

"It has always been limited, costly and challenging to recycle plastic, and it's breaking the recycling system's back," AMBR said, arguing that PET and HDPE containers, and to some extent polypropylene packaging, can be called recyclable but other plastics cannot.

Judging by our Plastics in Politics webinar this week, our audience has questions about the plastics treaty talks. One that came up: Is the industry doing enough to advocate for the benefits of the material in the negotiations?

That one caught my eye when it came through the Q&A box because it was also posed to me separately and independently by two industry representatives while we were all in Kenya attending the negotiations last month.

Both were first-time attendees and seemed to feel that the industry should be doing more to put its points forward.

I shared my perspective that the environmental and civil society groups were bringing more media staff and doing more public events at the talks.

I don't have a crystal ball, but those two conversations made me wonder if we'll see more public events or a larger public role from industry groups at the talks next time, in Canada in April.

Our audience had other questions, like how will the treaty look at chemical recycling, and can enough of a consensus emerge from the next round of talks in Ottawa for the treaty to move forward. To hear the discussion, check out the replay.