Welcome Brightmarkers to the 1st Quarterly SafeMark newsletter covering all things Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE). As you may have heard, this newsletter is designed to cover a wide range of topics in HSE, from ongoing projects to incident reviews to employee spotlights and interviews. This newsletter covers all Brightmark—both RNG and plastics—and is meant to be a positive source of information sharing.
HSE Culture: “Protect People and the Environment”
We are proud to have rolled out our new HSE Culture Tenant in the October ‘23 QBR. As part of that rollout, the HSE team wants to dive deeper into the meaning behind it. Defined as:
“Ensuring the resolute pursuit of health, safety, and environmental (HSE) excellence is a central part of everything we do through the empowerment of our people, protecting and preserving safety and the environment in which we do business, and guaranteeing communication is the cornerstone of our HSE culture.”
There are three keywords I’d like to highlight within that definition.
Resolute: Meaning firmly resolved or determined and set in purpose or opinion—we chose this because (to ensure we are truly protecting both people and the environment) we have to be unwavering and true to our course.
Excellence: Many times, when people view HSE, they think of compliance. However, we aim to be more than that. Compliance is a place to begin, not solely a benchmark we intend to reach. We want to be better than that, striving for world-class excellence.
Cornerstone: Defined as the first set stone in the construction of a foundation, we are setting the foundation for our HSE Culture and the company. We are doing this for current and future Brightmarkers of the world who are part of our mission. We want all to know we have built our programs on a solid foundation and built them to achieve the goal of Safely Reimaging Waste.
In future newsletters, we will get into more about the core elements that support the definition of our HSE Cultural tenant. These elements are:
- Empowerment is paramount
- Be Bright, do right, don’t waste in haste
- Preserve and persevere
- Communication is crucial
HSE Interviews and Spotlights
The most important part of our HSE Culture is our people. A lot is expected of each of us regarding protecting people and the environment. To do that, we need strong leadership at all levels of the organization, and that starts with the executive leadership team. To this end, I had the pleasure of conducting our very first HSE Interview with our Founder and CEO, Bob Powell.
HSE Management System and Learning Management System (LMS): Assure by Evotix.
As many of you might be aware, we’re just starting to configure our new HSE management system. This system is called Assure. Assure will be used by the entire business and will help us streamline how we manage some of the HSE requirements of our business. Some of the things to look forward to within the system in the 1st half of the year:
Learning Management System (LMS): This will consist of online courses—many regulatory required—that you will be assigned. There will be pre-made courses, but also those which we will be creating ourselves! You will be given a set timeto get your coursework completed and can do it at your leisure when your schedule allows. The great thing about this system is that you have the flexibility to do these on the computer or on the go. You can start and stop them at any point and come right back to where you left off. Mind you, most of these courses will have some type of test or quiz you need to pass, so make sure you pay attention and remember what’s taught!
Mobile-friendly: Both the management system and LMS will be mobile-friendly. They’re designed with a “Mobile First” philosophy. In a world on the go, this system will be at your fingertips when you need it.
Incident reporting: We are currently configuring the incident module where you can report all types of incidents as soon as they occur (or nearly occur in the event of a near miss). You can use a smart device to take pictures and upload them to accurately capture the details of what happened. These will then be escalated to HSE and other relevant teams for investigation, so we can take any corrective actions One important note—even if you’re reporting something on Assure, you need to report it directly to your manager to “assure” we’re correcting any immediate hazard or getting you the attention you need!
Risk management: Closing out the 1st half of the year, we will be configuring some of the risk management tools in the system, including Job Hazard Analysis (JHA), Chemical assessments, SDS Database, and some other risk assessments.
Future Newsletters
I hope you’ve enjoyed this first Quarterly HSE newsletter. In future newsletters, we will provide you with the status of ongoing projects and some key highlights, more executive interviews, incident summaries (if any), graphics, and much more!
Is there something else you’d like to see covered in these newsletters or interviews? Do you have a suggestion for an employee we should spotlight for exemplifying our HSE Culture? Do you want to be a contributor to our newsletter? If so, please feel free to email me at joseph.atkinson@brightmark.com.
Have a safe day!
