Kickstart: Safety basics

The basic rule of manufacturing maintenance safety seems to center on the basics of lockout/tag-out — essentially making sure the machine won't cycle on when someone is working on it.

So why are there still so many workplace injuries and even deaths related to ignoring the rules of lockout/tag-out? According to Steve Toloken's new reporting on workplace safety, Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors issued $798,000 in fines from 118 citations across 72 inspections for lockout/tag-out violations at plastics companies between October 2020 and September 2021. Add to that $707,000 in fines and 91 citations from 78 inspections for problems with machine guarding.

Yes, I'm aware that some workers violate the rules. They take shortcuts. They put themselves and others at risk. And of course, sometimes there are simply accidents that no one expected. But if your company culture lacks the focus on safety that instead encourages other people on the floor to look the other way when safety rules are broken, perhaps you need to take another look at your company culture. Failure to do carries a very big risk.

Just consider this phrase from Steve's story and do everything you can to not have your employees named in some future coverage: "Anita Irene Coester and Moses Kur were plastics industry employees in 2021 who had something in common: They showed up for a normal workday and were killed in accidents on the job."

On the flip side, injection molder Wise Plastics Technologies — West Chicago has received the national Safety and Health Achievement Recognition Program (SHARP) designation from the Illinois Department of Labor and its division of Occupational Safety and health.

The SHARP award is the second for Wise Plastics. Its headquarters St. Charles, Ill., plant won it in 2021.

To win the award, designated for small businesses, companies must undergo a comprehensive safety and health visit, correct any hazards, implement a safety and health management system, maintain a below-average number of recordable cases and agree to work with the state regarding any changes to working conditions or the introduction of new hazards.

"Increasing safety awareness and training while at the same time lower incident rates in the plastics manufacturing industry was an accomplishment on its own." Andy Purvin, EHS specialist with Wise Plastics, said in a news release from the state.

For any folks in the United Kingdom, I have a question: Is plastic grass really a thing people use in their gardens?

I recently came across a BBC report on an environmental campaign seeking to tax artificial, or "plastic," grass in the U.K. Those against artificial turf point to poor soil quality beneath the layer of tinted plastic, while those who favor it think it's a great option for sites where grass normally won't grow, such as small shaded gardens. (For its part, a government official told the BBC that there are no current plans to tax artificial grass.)

That report led me to a range of other stories about plastic grass, including a May 2022 report on the website Real Homes stating that a Google search showed that "searches for artificial grass increased 185 percent month-on-month in May 2020, coinciding with the many gardening projects people undertook in lockdown."