Reduced Energy & Impact
NIOSH Defines, Offers Six Steps to Protect Workers in Green Jobs
Though there are no official definitions for green
jobs and sustainable work practices,
they are being used more
and more in a wide range of industry sectors and
products, from farms to office buildings, so NIOSH
has defined them broadly as jobs and practices that
help to improve the environment.
For the purposes of a NIOSH
Science blog entitled “Going
Green: Safe and Healthy Jobs,”
such jobs could include: (a) new types of
jobs related to green technologies,
processes, outcomes and products; (b) existing
jobs where green practices and technologies
are being introduced; and (c)
existing jobs that create products viewed as
important to the green economy.
These types of jobs and practices all aim to reduce energy use and environmental impacts
while preserving social and economic
benefits. But do “green” and “sustainable”
also mean safe and healthy for workers?
As green and sustainable practices become
more common in the U.S, there is an
opportunity to promote worker safety and
health as a fundamental dimension of true sustainability. A sustainable product,
process or technology should not
only protect the environment and the
consumer but also the worker. Green
jobs must be safe jobs.
In December, the National Institute
for Occupational Safety and
Health (NIOSH) sponsored the
Making Green Jobs Safe Workshop.
At the Workshop, NIOSH presented
six ideas about the steps needed to
protect both workers and the environment
by making occupational
(worker) safety and health concepts part of
green and sustainability developments.
These ideas are explained below.
1. Define, categorize, and track green
jobs:
Defining and categorizing green and sustainable
jobs and work practices is a necessary
first step for identifying and understanding how green jobs affect worker safety and health. Researchers,
demographers, and industry partners need to work together
to develop ways to define and keep track of injuries,
illnesses, and hazards associated with green jobs. Standard terms
will reduce confusion, improve information-sharing, and make it
possible to see the worker safety and health benefits and problems
that arise over time.
2. Evaluate all green jobs, practices, processes, and products
for hazards to worker safety and health:
Sustainable practices and green technologies, products and
processes need to be evaluated for worker safety and health just
like any other new job, product or practice. Such evaluation can
identify work-related hazards that can then be prevented or controlled.
It can also help identify those green practices, products
and technologies that improve worker safety and health so that
they can be widely promoted.
In addition, the safety and health community can do more to
evaluate and understand the energy costs and environmental impacts
of safety and health practices. Green jobs, processes, products,
and technologies can all benefit from research to find out how
best to keep a high degree of safety and health while improving energy
efficiency and reducing environmental impacts.
3. Integrate worker safety and health, energy conservation
and environmental protection efforts:
Occupational safety and health, energy conservation and environmental
protection professionals often work separately from one
another, which increases the chances that costs and risks will be unintentionally
shifted from the environment to workers or vice versa.
Working together would help these professionals’ better coordinate
approaches to sustainability to make sure that workers, the environment
and energy resources are all protected.
4. Plan early for prevention:
Considering safety and health at the beginning of a project during
the design phase and when making decisions about what equipment
and materials to use are important, cost-effective strategies. At
NIOSH, these strategies are called Prevention through Design (PtD).
The principles of PtD can be used to achieve sustainability through
early planning to ensure that the resulting health, energy and environmental
benefits can be at their highest levels for workers, the
public and the environment.
5. Make safety and health part of green jobs training:
Training will play an important role in helping workers develop
the new skills needed to transition to new types of green jobs or to
learn how to use new products and technologies in their existing
jobs. Safety and health should be considered an essential component
for all green job training, in addition to training on the skills
workers need to complete job tasks.
6. Add safety and health to green benchmarks:
There are many different types of measurements and benchmarks
to evaluate whether practices are green and sustainable,
for example, the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building
Rating System.
While these are widely used, almost none of the measures directly
consider occupational safety and health impacts.
NIOSH says researchers and practitioners need to
work together to develop ways to determine whether a
practice is good for worker safety and health, and
then add that to the benchmarks for green and
sustainable practices.
FSM
