Sustainability & Safety as ONE

Confessions of a SAFE-AHOLIC By: Stephanie Zizzo, ASHM
Sustainability is a hot topic right now in the US and the world. We are always trying to find new ways to conserve our planets natural resources and make sure that we exist here meeting all our needs but still be able to provide a functioning home for our future generations.

With 60% of the Earth's ecosystem services being degraded in the past 50 years it is important that as safety professionals we make sure we can incorporate ourselves into various issues such as sustainability... but how?

To understand this we must look at it from a business stand point. Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR is the idea that companies can conduct business with ethics, keeping their communities, their employees, and their customers well being in mind. This idea is growing like wild fire among various companies such as General Electric, Kraft, NIKE, and Ford. It is easy to say you're a company maintaining its CSR... but what policies does that include? Here are a couple topics that are important to a company practicing CSR:

• Ethics
• Responsible Purchasing
• Environmental Impact
• Green Technologies
• Employee Training and Opportunity
• Resource Productivity
• Efficient Energy Use

Within these topics there is a strong focus to maintain environmental and economic sustainability.

So how does the safety professional help? In business there is always a bottom line and even with corporate social responsibility there is one as well. As I have learned while reading an article by Darryl Hill, it is a triple profit bottom line including people, profit, and planet. And one third of that bottom line is people. As a safety professional providing safety audits, training, loss control, HazCom and many other programs can help protect the people and the environment.

An example of this would be spending extra attention on all the new “green” projects that companies are working on. A lot of the time they spend so much time focusing on how to be sustainable and Eco-friendly that they loose sight of implementing extra safety audits to make sure that injury rates don't rise, because a “green” project isn't green if people are getting hurt. After all people are 33% of the CSR plan.

Sustainability creates a new workforce of green collar workers which is anyone employed in environmental sections of the economy. This is including environmental specialists which is a large population of safety professionals. With that said, Sustainability is a great opportunity for safety professionals to get their foot in another door and show just how important we all are!

Stay green and safe!