Founded in 1987, Alutrade, one of the well-sought aluminium recycling companies and extrusion specialists in the UK, claims to have invested between £1.2 million and £1.3 million to introduce better health and safety standards at the Midlands after the accidental demise of an employee in 2017.
The departed soul, Stuart Towns, was only thirty-five years old when he succumbed to severe blows in his head induced at Alutrade’s site on Tat Bank Road, Oldbury.
After being accused of corporate manslaughter, Alutrade was defamed at the Wolverhampton Crown Court in March and was charged almost £2 million. Three senior management members were also subjected to penalties after they were proven guilty following the Health and Safety at Work Act.
The director at Alutrade, Andrew Powell, told sources that after the accident, the company had mounted various sign boards along the premises, zebra crossings to differentiate walkways from car routes and two-metre fencing around each plant to protect them.
According to Mr Powell, Alutrade has spent ‘the best part of £80,000’ on re-tarmacking and ‘hundreds of thousands' on reinstating the concrete skeleton.
Currently, the staffs have to go through health and safety training since ‘they’ve also got their own responsibility towards themselves.”
“Everything now is done with health and safety first and everything else second, profitability or whatever it might be,” Mr Powell added.
Alutrade, to enhance the workability of its employees, has also appointed key personnel solely responsible for the safety of the employees. With a specialised transport manager, Alutrade has also introduced John Thompson as a designated health and safety manager just after the accident.
Though Mark Redfern was fined £15,000 for his part in the accident as a health and safety manager, he later kept his job in Alutrade.
Mr Powell illustrated the fact while saying: “It was too much for him. So, John has taken a dedicated health and safety role.”
Mr Thompson’s first step is to bag the British Standards Institution’s ISO 45001 standard, which specifically mentions the need for an occupational health and management system and also demands an external audit counsel.
“As far as I was concerned, we wanted to be a leader within industry safety,” Mr Thompson said. “With the 45001, if you look at the scope of that standard, there’s a lot of emphasis on the drive from a senior management point of view. They’ve got an input.”
“That helped the culture change because you’ve got the senior management involved. When you look at the transition to the 45001, we’ve seen the buy-in very quickly.
“Yes, you’ve got to be quite forceful at the very beginning. It’s not friendly, but you have to because you’re changing things completely.”
Mr Thompson says Alutrade allowed him to implement all the changes he believed were necessary. “Everything that I sat down and went through with the board of directors that I believed that we needed to do, we’ve done,” he said.
“Money wasn’t the issue. The key was to try and make sure that it was right and that our systems were in place.”
In 2015, the Health and Safety Executive, who visited Alutrade, issued a contravention notice against the company due to the absence of gates on the ‘Biffa Line’, reported the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
The Biffa Line differentiates residual waste from Biffa and other clients like AmeyCespa, to ‘take out the majority of the waste and leave can products, which we then put through our can shedding facility.’
In 2017, Alutrade was receiving “tons and tons and tons” of material, as was confirmed by Mr Powell, therefore deciding to install a larger machine. “In 2017, we were in the process of final commissioning of that machine when the accident happened,” Mr Powell added in disbelief.
Alutrade is planning to enhance the line again. “We’ve got some trials next week with some new sorting technology which will reduce the size, reduce the number of conveyors, the number of moving parts. Material is literally put it in one end; it comes out the other end,” Mr Powell explained.
Mr Powell also notified that the new line would be “intrinsically” safer than the old Biffa Line. “There’s less to go wrong on it. There are fewer people working there. There are fewer moving parts to it,” he concluded.
Alutrade’s average estimation states that the company recycles around 30,000 tonnes of metal each year, consisting of 10,000 tonnes of cans equivalent to 670 million individual containers.
Alutrade has declared that it recycled one-third of all the cans manufactured in 2010 in the United Kingdom.
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