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Dive Summary:
- Together for Safer Roads, a national fleet truck safety organization, has partnered with the National Waste & Recycling Association to extend its fleet safety program to the association’s independent waste and recycling haulers. NWRA is looking for carriers with fewer than 100 trucks to join the new cohort.
- The The FOCUS on Fleet Safety Training Program helps small and medium fleet operators adopt best practices to improve their safety culture. The program has been running since 2022, but the NWRA partnership is aimed at waste and recycling operators who often have time, staff and resource constraints that larger operators may not have.
- Previous FOCUS trainings were conducted live, but TSR is working on an updated version of the program that can be completed in online modules, making the program more accessible and adaptable to independent operator programs, the organization said.
Dive Insight:
The partnership comes as the waste industry is constantly working to improve injury and fatality rates, including accidents and fatalities related to fleet vehicles. Garbage collection was registered as n seventh deadliest job in the US in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
At the same time, NWRA members are looking for safety resources that recognize the multiple roles that workers at smaller companies must play, said Kirk Sander, chief of staff and vice president of safety and standards. “For the most part, if you’re a company with under 50 trucks, you don’t really have a dedicated safety manager,” he said.
TSR works with businesses, community groups and government agencies to prevent injuries and deaths related to vehicle crashes, including through fleet safety programs, distracted driving programs and the promotion of in-cab dash cameras.
CONCENTRATE it is intended to be a flexible program Independent carriers can adjust their operations and priorities, said Peter Goldwasser, TSR’s executive director. The programme, which stands for ‘fairness, transparency, competence, unity and sustainability’, covers aspects such as building a culture of safety and understanding drivers’ perspectives and motivations. It also delves into strategies for collecting data, evaluating leading and lagging indicators, choosing the right security technology, and other aspects. FOCUS also offers executive coaching and benchmarking resources.
Ultimately, FOCUS aims to “really meet drivers and companies where they are,” Goldwasser said. “What does a culture of safety mean to you, your drivers and your business and what does it look like?”
A previous version of the program required participants to log into live webinars, which Goldwasser said made it difficult for some participants to attend due to scheduling conflicts. “We still want the fleets to work together and learn from each other,” he said. “The idea was how do we lower the barrier to entry?”
A new “FOCUS 2.0” version will now allow cohort carriers to participate in recorded training modules in their own time, but still sets aside parts of the program where participants can work with peers.
Establishing training that works for small and medium-sized fleets is important, as they make up about 88 percent of all commercial fleets on the road, Goldwasser said.
Previous cohorts have included a mix of different types of equipment companies Rental groups at office furniture suppliers, as well as waste companies like Filco Carting and composting organizations like GrowNYC, Goldwasser said. The NWRA task force will include companies that are all active in the waste industry.
NWRA first works with TSR in 2020 in an effort to free up more of the organization’s security resources relationship members. The Democracy Services are located at global advisory group for TSR along with other partners such as PepsiCo and UPS. The Republic has approved the FOCUS program, which Sander said is an important way to show independent companies that the program understands how important fleet safety is to the waste industry. “We hope this can really help with engagement,” Sander said.
Allowing fleet operators to connect with each other and share ideas can also go a long way in helping individual companies promote stronger safety environments, Goldwasser said. “Security has to come from the top and the bottom, and it has to be a collaborative process, or it doesn’t feel authentic to this business. And that’s really critical,” he said.