Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

The concrete sector is a tough sector in which heavy loads are worked with under dangerous conditions. This is reflected in the number of occupational accidents with time lost in the 2005-2007 period. The average amount of accidents within the Echo Group was 75 per year, while the average amount of days lost due to this came to 1,325 per year. This equals 3.6 FTE/year who were constantly absent. In order to tackle this problem, the policy was amended by the General Management at the end of 2006: “The safety of our employees is priority.” In order to achieve this, it was decided in 2007 to start a project in all of the production sites, the objective of which was to reduce the number of occupational accidents with time lost to zero. At the end of 2008, Echo succeeded in reducing the number of accidents within the Group by 47.5%, compared to 2007. This article de scribes how this was achieved, what strategies were adopted, what has already been done and what is still planned in order to achieve the final objective of “zero accidents”.