What You Need To Know About Landfill Safety

Working in waste disposal requires employees to understand the safety risks associated with the job. Hazardous materials can pass through your facility, and the nature of the work, namely creating and maintaining landfills, poses several safety risks. Be aware of what you need to know about landfill safety, ensuring that you and your fellow workers go home at the end of the day without serious injury or health concerns.

Never Compromise Training

Landfill operations need specialized equipment that can pose a significant threat to workers without proper handling or maintenance. Whether employees use backhoe loaders, compactors, excavators, or material handlers, you need to institute proper training and guarantee certification before any work gets done.

One of the most common sources of work-related injuries stems from a lack of adequate training, allowing employees to use equipment they have incomplete knowledge on. You must be strict with access to these machines until workers prove their competency and reliability.

Maintain Your Machinery

Through constant use, your equipment will inevitably fail, given enough time. There’s no getting around this fact, and you need to keep up with regular service schedules. Aside from routine maintenance, it’s essential you have a log of all repairs done to specific pieces of equipment. This documented history will allow you to pinpoint any recurring issues with individual machines, alerting you to unreliable and faulty equipment.

When the time comes to finally replace heavy machinery, you need to get it done sooner rather than later, as allowing landfill heavy machinery to degrade past the point of safety endangers workers. Know the landfill equipment you need to replace, and get it done immediately.

Create Procedures for Before and After an Incident

Invariably, there will be incidents that happen on your landfill, the frequency of which can be greater or lesser based on your overall company safety culture. But these incidents do occur, and thus, you need to have procedures in place to handle whatever happened adequately.

Your top priority is to ensure your employees are safe and see to their injuries as soon as possible. Have protocols in place to call for help, assist medical workers in any way you can, and document the accident for future reference. Getting caught without a plan leaves you vulnerable to mistakes and mismanaging employee safety.

Always Look for Improvements

Becoming complacent or neglecting to plan for potential risks endangers workers, allowing for the possibility of a significant accident. Be aware of what you need to know about landfill safety and ensure all workers are in a safe environment where they will receive immediate assistance if something goes wrong.