Where competition ends and safety begins (Part 1)

But there is one area where I believe competition has no place, and that's keeping people safe and well.

As chair of the Environmental Services Association (ESA) Health and Safety Strategy Group, and through my involvement with the Waste Industry Safety and Health (WISH) Forum and CIWM, I spend a lot of time in rooms with people who, on paper, are our competitors. In practice, they're some of the most valued colleagues I have. I want to share why that matters, and why I think more of us should get involved.

Our risks don't respect company logos

A reversing refuse vehicle is just as dangerous whatever livery it wears. A lithium-ion battery hidden in a black bag ignites just as easily in one operator's truck as in another's. A picker on a line faces the same needle in the recycling, whoever runs the facility.

The latest figures show why this matters. HSE's provisional statistics for 2025/26 show waste and recycling had the second highest fatal injury rate of any main industry sector, at 5.47 deaths per 100,000 workers. The average across all industries was 0.37, meaning workers in our sector face a rate of fatal injury nearly 15 times higher. Being struck by a moving vehicle accounted for almost half of fatal incidents in waste and recycling, compared with around one in six across all industries, while entanglement and entrapment in machinery has become one of the fastest rising causes of major injury.

Behind every one of those numbers is a family, a crew and a community. That is a shared problem, and shared problems need shared solutions.

Some of the collective challenges we're working through together right now include:

• Vehicles and transport: still the biggest cause of fatal incidents, from reversing and pedestrian separation to driver standards and road risk.
• Battery fires: in vehicles, depots and facilities, which are rising fast as batteries and disposable vapes find their way into every waste stream.
• Regulatory change: including new food waste collections, packaging producer responsibility, deposit return and digital waste tracking. Each one changes our vehicles, rounds and sites, and brings new hazards with it.
• Occupational health: including bioaerosols, dust, noise, heat stress and musculoskeletal strain, the harms that don't make headlines but shape people's lives.
• Our people: facing abuse from the public, mental health pressures, and the difficulty of engaging a workforce with high agency use and turnover.

No single organisation has all the answers to these. Together, we get a lot closer.

Safety is not commercially sensitive

I often hear a hesitation about sharing: "Won't that give away our advantage?" My answer is simple. If your competitive edge relies on keeping a lesson that could prevent someone else's injury to yourself, that isn't an advantage worth having.

There are practical reasons too:

• Our workforce moves between us. When contracts change hands, employees, agency workers and drivers often transfer with them. The person you train today may work for a competitor next year, and the reverse is equally true.
• One incident affects us all. A serious fire or fatality anywhere in the sector shapes how the public, regulators, insurers and customers see every one of us.
• We share the same supply chain. Speaking with one voice to vehicle and equipment manufacturers gives us far more influence over safer design than any one buyer has alone.
• A united voice carries weight. When we engage with regulators and government as a sector, we can help shape practical, workable standards rather than react to them.
• Smaller operators benefit. Not every business has an HSE team. Shared guidance helps raise the floor for everyone, including the smaller firms who keep our industry running.

To be clear, this collaboration happens properly. Trade association meetings follow competition law rules, and conversations stay firmly on safety and health, never pricing or commercial matters. That discipline is part of what builds trust. (To be continued)

(For the second part of this series, we will move from the ‘why’ to the ‘how’ and look at what real collaboration looks like, and how groups like ESA, WISH and CIWM turn shared risks into collective action and improvement. Stay tuned!)