Safety: The great equalizer

Jerry Sjogren spent more than three decades as a scrapyard operator in the Northeast and currently serves as senior director of safety at the Washington-based Recycled Materials Association (ReMA). In his career, he’s seen plenty of examples of what to do—and what to avoid—when developing a safety plan.

For example, he once performed an audit at a yard in the Northeast region and reviewed its emergency action plan. In his reading, he discovered instructions for what to do in the event of an employee being electrocuted while working on a telephone pole. He found another description of what to do in the event of a volcanic eruption.

When he asked about the origin of the safety guide, the yard owner said he’d received it from a friend who owned a company in the western U.S., where such disasters might have a higher likelihood of occurring.

“I said it’s OK to use a canned plan, but you need to really read that carefully and then make sure what you have in it fits for what you’re doing,” Sjogren says. “Oftentimes, what we see people do is go online and get ahold of a canned plan, plug your name in here, and that’s a recipe for disaster because it doesn’t fit with your particular facility.”

When it comes to mitigating fire risk, he says the same holds true. ReMA Vice President of Safety Mike Marino puts it succinctly. “Safety is the great equalizer,” he says.

“One day, you think you have everything under control, then an emergency will show you that you don’t. You need to keep safety top of mind. It’s a leadership issue and a safety culture issue.”

Assessing the risks

Marino notes that the complexity of material streams entering scrapyards has increased, which is accompanied by a heightened risk of fires.

In particular, he says the potential increase in the number of batteries hiding within that incoming material adds to it.

“There is definitely data out there to say that we’re having more fires,” he says. “But it’s really tough to pinpoint that the cause of a fire is a battery because they can be small and they burn really quickly and hot. By the time you get to them, there’s nothing left, and then you have to do a cause and origin analysis. Batteries are an issue, but it’s really tough to pinpoint that.”

Noting that the battery spectrum includes those found in vape pens all the way up to electric vehicles (EVs), Sjogren says he’s seen instances of companies taking EV batteries out of a vehicle with no plan on what to do with them, so they might be hidden in a load and sent to another yard or a larger company.

“You’ve got your feeder yards, which are small, and the feeder yards send their material to the larger companies, yards that may have a shredder,” he says. “Oftentimes, it’s difficult when you’ve got a whole load of material to determine whether or not you have any batteries in those loads. That’s a significant challenge for us.”

While batteries are top of mind for recyclers, other fire risks can arise around a yard. For example, Marino says hot work continues to be an issue, cautioning that introducing flames and torching to an operation inherently is dangerous.

Additionally, Marino says equipment fires that spread into a facility continue to be an issue, along with weather-related emergencies such as lightning strikes and even scrap piles that have become too large.

“Those [emergency events] are still happening, and some of them may be increasing in frequency, like battery fires,” Marino says. “But we’re still trying to holistically address the fire threat through different resources.”

Creating a plan

When speaking to ReMA members about scrapyard safety and fire prevention, Sjogren and Marino make sure to say that the time to have a safety plan is prior to an emergency, not during or after.

“You don’t want to find out the hard way that you’ve made mistakes or that you’re not ready to go,” Sjogren says, adding that yard management and employees should regularly talk about where to go, what to do and who to call in the event of a blaze.

“We talk about muscle memory,” he continues. “When [an issue arises], people might panic, get nervous and lose track of what they need to do. But if you have trained over and over and ingrained [the safety plan] in them, things just come naturally. … It doesn’t happen all the time, but you’re pretty successful most of the time when you’ve taken the time to teach people and get them ready.”

In Sjogren’s view, employees should train on the safety plan at least once a year but recommends additional training. He also that suggests management allow employees to voice opinions on safety measures that might fit the location and any flaws that might exist in the current plan.

“That’s when you’re going to get the best plan because they’re in the trenches,” Sjogren says. “They understand what might work and what might not work, and they would introduce to you some concerns they might have with that plan.”

Marino agrees that the plan should be actionable and routinely reviewed.

“It really starts with a safety culture,” he says. “That’s from leadership down to really make sure that it is ingrained in folks so they understand it’s OK to bring issues forward and not have your head in the sand and think these things aren’t going to happen to you.”

Marino also suggests differentiating employee training to include fire-specific training for new employees, then continuing training on a yearly basis once they get more familiar with the yard.

“A knowledgeable operator can mitigate some of those [fire] risks before they get bad,” he says.

Sjogren says “housekeeping is huge,” and that operators should keep enough distance between piles of material so fire can’t spread from one to the next. Also, he says, it’s important for yards to make sure all egresses and exit routes are clear.

“I can’t tell you how many times I have seen an egress door where you open it and there’s a pallet of material just on the other side of the door,” Sjogren continues. “What’s going to happen is people may trip and fall over each other trying to get out of there on that debris that’s sitting there.”

Battery identification training looms large, and Sjogren says it’s important for employees to be trained on what different batteries look like and be outfitted with the proper personal protective equipment and tools to remove them and store them in a safe area.

“We teach people to use the senses,” he says. “You’re going to get an electric cherry bubblegum sweet smell. If it’s starting to give off gas and go into thermal runaway, you’re going to have swollen batteries. You may have some examples of heat coming off of those batteries. But you need to understand how to deal with those when [you’re] in that situation.”

Technology also can help scrapyards mitigate fire risks. Marino says promising equipment includes thermal camera systems that can be positioned around a site to detect the potential for an event, as well as handheld thermal imaging cameras that can be used to inspect scrap piles and fire suppression systems.

Sjogren adds that such systems should be checked regularly, including before a yard closes for the night.

“If you have fire suppression systems, have they been exercised? Are they inspected? Are they ready to go and accessible?” he says. “Oftentimes people have them and they buy them and they put them on the wall, but they never get inspected, they never get tested and they go beyond their expiration date. Then they’re pretty much useless from that point.”

ReMA also offers courses on a wide range of safety and compliance topics, including a hands-on course for facilities that break down EVs.

Outside help

Earlier in his career, Marino was a firefighter in Prince George’s County, Maryland, near Washington, and understands firsthand the importance of the relationship between metal recyclers and first responders.

“If you haven’t built that relationship already, we say it’s a gap and you need to pick up the phone the next business day and do this,” he says. “It just takes that first step. I really like to preach, coming from that side of the house early in my career, that the fire service wants to understand what they’re going to get into. [For scrapyard operators], nobody’s going to come there and beat you up.”

Marino says he believes there can be hesitation on the part of yard operators to bring in police or fire departments for fear of inspections or fines, but that shouldn’t be a concern.

“I think there’s a whole host of expertise at your local fire department or your fire marshal’s office that you could leverage to help you build a better and safer facility.”

He suggests that operators invite local police and fire departments out to tour their yards and give feedback on potential fire hazards.

For fire departments, he says scrapyards can serve as helpful training grounds.

“I was on a heavy rescue squad for a long time, and the fire department loves to come up with new training to keep people fresh and involved,” he says. “We’d love going to our local yard to find things like cars we could cut up and train on. [Operators] can say, ‘Come on out. We’ve got some cars, cut them up, practice different scenarios, whatever you want to do.’ I think the stronger you make that relationship, the safer your facility really can be.”

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