Practice what you preach

For years, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) ranked collecting refuse and recycling as the fifth-most-dangerous occupation in the U.S. because of high fatal work injury rates. In 2020, it ranked as the sixth-deadliest job before falling to No. 7 in 2021.

While the industry has made strides in promoting workplace safety, fatalities and injuries remain high. In 2021, BLS recorded 34 fatalities in solid waste collection and four in material recovery facilities.

Leck Waste Services, a family-owned waste management company based in Ivyland, Pennsylvania, has sought to improve the industry’s safety record by encouraging safety among its personnel, which has the added benefit of lowering costs.

With three facilities outside the Greater Philadelphia metro area, the company employs roughly 105 workers and has a fleet of 80 trucks, about 60 of which run daily routes. Leck Waste also has a fleet of loaders and skid steers that operate at its transfer station.

About six years ago, Leck Waste Services President Jason Leck recognized the need to improve safety in the industry.

“I felt very strongly about the fact that [these statistics] were not what Leck was doing,” he says. Leck adds that while he felt his company was a top safety performer, “we were paying for all the bad actors in our sector” as insurance premiums continued to increase.

From that point, he decided safety would drive every decision at Leck Waste.

“I was trying to get out of the traditional insurance market, and I was looking to get into captive insurance,” he says. “In order to be in a captive insurance policy, you have to be a top performer to begin with. My goal, once I got accepted into the National Interstate [Insurance] waste captive program [in 2018], was … to be the best-performing waste hauler in this captive program.”

Company officials then began crafting a plan to implement more rigorous safety measures, which included coaching drivers, using onboard cameras and creating training guidelines.

Eye on the prize

Since Leck Waste’s initial efforts, the company has earned two Safety Awards and one honorable mention from the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), Silver Spring, Maryland. In 2020, the company won the Biggest Safety Improvement award for its weekly safety training, enhanced new hire orientation program, defensive driving training and in-vehicle video recording systems.

Leck says the company added software from Austin, Texas-based 3rd Eye to its fleet that year, and the software’s coaching metrics were used to retain drivers during the pandemic. Leck says the company used data from 3rd Eye to identify the safest drivers, whom would be paid more hourly than lower-performing drivers.

Leck Waste’s Director of Health and Safety John Andel asked Leck how the company would set a new goal after meeting its initial one. “And I said, ‘Well, what is the industry not doing?’” Leck recalls.

During this discussion, Leck says Andel mentioned needing more specified and flexible training, and they decided to bring on another third-party software program called Convergence Training in December 2020, which has since been folded into its parent company, Tampa, Florida-based Vector Solutions.

The new software enabled Leck Waste to develop safety training based on driver data recorded by 3rd Eye.

A key element that drew Leck to Vector’s software was its ability to allow workers to complete training on their own time using a computer, tablet or cellphone.

“Instead of sitting in the classroom and doing lunchbox talks with 20 guys at 5 o’clock in the morning, we wanted that learning to happen at a time that was convenient for the employees, so they were more engaged,” he says.

The training, which extends to all Leck Waste personnel—even office and sales personnel—covers a wide variety of safety-related issues, such as accident and injury reporting, aggressive driving, fall protection, fire safety, workplace harassment, cellphone use and more. Modules include a mix of computer-based training, documents and quizzes.

Using analytics from 3rd Eye, drivers are graded using a safety “scorecard,” and top performers are rewarded. Drivers are graded on hard braking, hard acceleration, speeding, distracted driving, etc.

Leck Waste’s managers frequently look for personnel who are practicing proper safety. Those employees who are recognized can win a Safety Star of the Month award. Awardees have their photos placed on an employee communication board at each site and are given a pin to wear on their uniforms.

Winners also are entered into a drawing for Safe Employee of the Year, which comes with a $2,500 bonus and additional paid time off, Leck says.

He continues, “Everybody at Leck has some type of ownership in what safety actually means.”

Tangible savings

In the first three years since implementing the new training program, Leck Waste has seen a decrease in overall accidents and injuries. In 2023, the company’s auto liability incident frequency decreased to 9.4 percent from 18 percent in 2020.

Leck says he refers to Herbert William Heinrich’s theory of industrial safety as a baseline to quantify the probability of safety incidents.

In his 1931 book, Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach, Heinrich, a health and safety researcher, stated that 88 percent of accidents are caused by “unsafe acts of persons.” He created the accident pyramid, which established the 300-29-1 ratio of workplace accidents, a theory that, in a group of 330 accidents, 300 will result in no injuries, 29 will result in minor injuries and one will result in a major injury.

“What we were trying to do is to stretch out how far [apart] those incidents would actually occur through coaching and training,” Leck says.

These efforts didn’t go unnoticed. In 2023, Leck Waste received the Best Safety Training Program award from SWANA for its “proactive approach toward training and provid[ing] employees with electives that they could use to build their careers,” according to the association.

As for insurance premiums, Leck says the company is seeing a roughly 25 percent return on annual premiums. These returns are received in the form of tax-advantageous dividends offered through Leck Waste’s captive insurance program.

“When your insurance premiums are a million dollars, it’s a big deal that at the end of the year you’re getting a check, or in three years, you’re getting a check back for $250,000,” he says. “That’s real money that really flows into the bottom line, especially when you’re in a market like the waste industry where margins are tight to begin with.”

Leck Waste has reinvested some of these returns into an employee wellness program that includes wellness fairs, blood draws and monthly health coaching with registered nurses.

“If you can improve the employees’ health, they come in, and they make better decisions when they’re at work,” Leck says. “They’re safer, they’re not cutting corners because they’re not tired. Or they’re making better health choices at home.”

Through its captive insurance program and by allocating resources that normally would be spent on purchasing insurance in the traditional marketplace to start programs benefiting employees, the company can foster a better, more attractive working environment, Leck says.

“By attracting better employees and saying that you know that your culture is a safe work environment, you have a tendency to bring the best of the best that are out there as employees … because they want to be a part of that,” he says.

When a majority of the industry struggled to find qualified drivers and laborers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Leck says his company’s culture helped Leck Waste maintain staffing.

“It certainly was not as hard to attract good employees because they saw what the culture was here [and] that we weren’t going to require drivers to break the hours-of-service rules or drive equipment that should have been out of service,” he says of the company’s recruiting efforts. “It’s about driving the culture of safety; it isn’t just saying it.”

The author is associate editor of Waste Today and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.