Leading Safety Indicators: Proactively Monitoring Safety Performance

Traditional measures or indicators of workplace safety performance reflect unrecognized hazards, unsafe conditions, reckless behavior, and other safety program shortcomings only after a worker is injured or falls ill. In contrast to traditional or lagging indicators, leading indicators can predict poor safety performance to ensure that safety program failings are addressed before an occupational injury or illness actually occurs. This Capstone Project identified a variety of proactive safety management practices, policies, and activities shown to have a positive impact on workplace safety as leading safety indicators. The end result is a comprehensive framework of leading safety indicators that employers can use to proactively gauge safety program performance and address unrecognized hazards, unsafe conditions, reckless behavior, and other safety program deficiencies.

A Regulatory Compliance Plan for Decommissioning a Sodium Phosphate Manufacturing Plant

Sodium phosphates are a class of chemicals that have been widely employed in commercial and consumer applications. However, declining use of these chemicals due to environmental concerns has lead to restructuring within the industry that has caused, and is likely to continue to cause, reduction of sodium phosphate production capacity. Closure of a sodium phosphate manufacturing plant necessitates decommissioning and decontamination activities that are subject to a variety of federal, state, and local regulations. A compliance plan was developed to provide a blueprint for ensuring that all federal regulatory requirements are met, however, site dependent state and local requirements were excluded. The compliance plan provides a framework that addresses project team formation and project planning, regulatory requirements, identification of affected processing equipment, plant pre-shutdown activities, waste stream identification and waste management facilities, safety, training, and emergency preparedness planning, and project decommissioning remedial actions. This regulatory compliance plan will enable sodium phosphate plant operators to complete decontamination and decommissioning work in a timely, efficient, compliant, and cost effective manner.