The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) has announced the 2019 winners of its Healthy Workplaces Good Practice Awards.
EU-OSHA’s 14th annual Healthy Workplaces Good Practice Awards, recognising companies which demonstrated an ‘outstanding commitment’ to occupational safety and health (OSH), focused on rewarding organisations which successfully managed the inherent risks in handling dangerous substances; as part of EU-OSHA’s 2018-2019 Healthy Workplaces Manage Dangerous Substances campaign. The jury assessed companies’ implementation of good practice; holistic approaches to substance management; levels of commitment by both management and workers; and organisations’ application of the STOP hierarchy of priorities:
- Substitution of the dangerous substance;
- Implementing Technological solutions to minimise the concentration of the substance in the area of exposure;
- Organisational measures to minimise the number of workers exposed to the substance and the duration of exposure; and
- The wearing of personal Protective equipment.
The Healthy Workplaces Good Practice Awards were given to six companies:
- VAKOS XT, a.s., a pharmaceutical producer based in Czechia, for its measures aimed at protecting public service personnel from exposure to illegal narcotics during police actions;
- Eiffage Infrastructures, a French road construction and maintenance firm, which has developed new techniques to eliminate the need for hazardous solvents in its laboratories;
- The German Federal Association of Glazier Trades, for promoting safe practice in the handling of materials contaminated with asbestos;
- Peluquería Elvira, a Spanish hairdresser and beauty salon which has worked to improve salon working conditions and phase out the use of hazardous substances;
- Atlas Copco Industrial Technique AB, based in Sweden, which has deployed collective measures to protect workers handling carbon nanotubes; and
- Mansholt BV, a Dutch farming company, which has devised a series of measures to protect its employees from hazardous dust.
Dr Christa Sedlatschek, Executive Director of EU-OSHA, said: “We are delighted to see so many strong and varied examples of good occupational safety and health practice in the context of managing dangerous substances. The winning examples are from enterprises and organisations of a wide variety of sizes and from various sectors, all with a common goal: to create a culture of prevention and protect workers from dangerous substances.”
