Guide to Hazardous Material Management: Avoiding Workplace Riskin Australia & New Zealand

Why hazardous waste management matters to businesses

If you’re reading this guide, you might strongly suspect or definitively know that your business generates or inadvertently hosts hazardous materials. Many companies do. Hazardous substances remain integral to the modern economy; they were long a driver of growth, especially in advanced economies. In consequence, you’ll find hazardous substances across the business landscape, even in small or medium-sized enterprises.

But irrespective of size and access to resources, all businesses must comply with hazardous materials regulations in place in their jurisdiction. What’s more, the regulatory frameworks that affect most firms are multilayered, consisting of international, federal/national, state, and/or local statutes. Companies need heed all relevant regulations to be considered fully in compliance.

And those regulations aren’t static either. The recognition of the hazards posed by potential contaminants often lags far behind widespread use of the chemical substance in question. Moreover, regulators continue to develop a deeper understanding of the latest environmental and health science.

Hazardous substance management is about the health of your workforce as well. Just a decade ago, nearly 900,000 workers died due to hazardous substance exposure at workⁱ. Worryingly, hazardous wastes are trending upwardsⁱⁱ. To firms, the affected worker populations at the heart of these facts and figures – hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of injuries – represent significant legal exposure under the terms of work health and safety laws, as in the relevant jurisdictions, the person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) will most likely have the primary duty to ensure the safe use, handling, and storage of hazardous substances.

For firms struggling to deal with hazardous waste management in compliance with work health and safety statutes – by the way, most are – we’re here to help. This guide attempts to help business operators effectively manage their hazardous waste in accordance with model regulations in Australia and health and safety at work policies in New Zealand. The guide will examine key historical trends in hazardous waste in the two jurisdictions, lay out the acute challenges companies face, and discuss the role mobile technology can play in the effective management of hazardous waste. 

Defining hazardous materials by the statutes

First things first. What are hazardous substances, actually? Each jurisdiction will define hazardous waste and substances (slightly) differently. But essentially, waste is considered hazardous if it presents a physical, chemical, or biological hazard to people or the environment. Simple enough. But waste varies by type, which can include the following:

• Hazardous residues of waste material that may contaminate and persist in water and soil, i.e. sludge from re-refining used oil that contains a variety of contaminants.
• Hazardous residues that are released into the atmosphere as products of combustion, i.e. dioxin.

The Basel Convention, of which both Australia and New Zealand are signatories, regulates the transboundary movement of hazardous waste. The Convention defines hazardous waste as waste that has any of the following characteristics:

• Explosive
• Flammable liquids/solids
• Poisonous
• Toxic
• Etoxic
• Infectious substances

Wastes that belong to the above category include the following:

• Clinical wastes
• Waste oils/water, hydrocarbons/water mixtures, emulsions
• Wastes from the production, formulation and use of resins, latex, plasticizers, glues/adhesives
• Wastes resulting from surface treatment of metals and plastics
• Residues arising from industrial waste disposal operations
• Wastes which contain certain compounds, such as copper, zinc, cadmium, mercury, lead, and asbestos
• Household waste
• Residues arising from the incineration of household waste

What hazardous waste means in Australia and New Zealand

Jurisdictional definitions don’t vary too much from that model. In Australia, for instance, hazardous waste is waste that, by its characteristics, poses a threat or risk to public health, safety, or the environment. This term corresponds to the following:

• Wastes that cannot be imported or exported from Australia without a permit under the Hazardous Waste (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act 1989.
• Wastes that any jurisdiction regulates as requiring particularly high level of management and control; they vary by state and territory, including regulated waste (in Queensland,) trackable waste (in New South Wales,) prescribed waste (in Victoria,) listed waste (in Southern Australia and Northern Territory,) or controlled waste (in the Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania, and Western Australia).
• Additional wastes nominated as hazardous by the Australian Government. 

Additionally, a hazard has a set of inherent properties that may cause adverse effects to organisms or the environment. There are a couple of broad types of hazards, which may present immediate or long-term injury threats. They are as follows: 

• Health hazards. These are properties of a chemical that have the potential to cause adverse health effects. Exposure usually occurs through inhalation, skin contact, or ingestion. Adverse health effects can be acute (short term) or chronic (long term). Typical acute health effects include headaches, nausea or vomiting, and skin corrosion, while chronic health effects, include asthma, dermatitis, nerve damage, or cancer.
• Physicochemical hazards. These are physical or chemical properties of the substance, mixture or article that pose risks to workers other than health risks, as they do not occur as a consequence of the biological interaction of the chemical with people. They arise through inappropriate handling or use and can often result in injury to people and/or damage to property as a result of the intrinsic physical hazard. Examples of physicochemical hazards include the following, flammable, corrosive, explosive, chemically reactive and oxidizing chemicals. 

In New Zealand, the term hazardous substance refers to any product or chemical, which includes any of the following intrinsic properties:

• Explosiveness
• Flammability
• A capacity to oxidize
• Corrosiveness
• Toxicity (including chronic toxicity)
• Ecotoxicity
• Or, which on contact with or water (other than air or water where the temperature or pressure has been artificially increased or decreased) generates a substance with any one or more of the properties specified above

What firms need to know about hazardous waste regulations

In Australia, the federal government has some responsibilities for hazardous waste regulation, both under the Hazardous Waste (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act 1989 and the National Waste Policy. The bulk of regulation, however, falls to individual states and territoriesⁱⁱⁱ.

More relevant to employers will be the work health and safety regulations that impose a primary duty of care requirement on them. Those regulations include specific duties for the PCBU to manage the risks to health and safety associated with using, handling, generating and storing hazardous chemicals at a workplace. Those duties are as follows:

• Correct labelling of containers and pipework, using warning placards and outer warning placards and displaying of safety signs.
• Maintaining a register and manifest (where relevant) of hazardous chemicals and providing notification to the regulator of manifest quantities if required. 
• Identifying risk of physical or chemical reaction of hazardous chemicals and ensuring the stability of hazardous chemicals.
• Ensuring that exposure standards are not exceeded.
• Provision of health monitoring to workers.
• Provision of information, training, instruction, and supervision to workers.
• Provision of spill containment systems for hazardous chemicals if necessary. 
• Obtaining the current Safety Data Sheet (SDS) from the manufacturer, importer or supplier of the chemical. 
• Controlling ignition sources and accumulation of flammable and combustible substances.
• Provision and availability of fire protection, fire-fighting equipment, and emergency and safety equipment. 
• Preparing an emergency plan if the quantity of a class of hazardous chemical at a workplace exceeds the manifest quantity for that hazardous chemical. 
• Stability and support containers for bulk hazardous chemicals including pipework and attachments.
• Decommissioning of underground storage and handling systems. 
• Notifying the relevant regulator as soon as practicable of abandoned tanks in certain circumstances. 

For the last few decades, New Zealand’s Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 (HSNO) regulated the use of hazardous substances across their life cycle. In essence, the Act created “a regime of controls” for how hazardous substances were contained, labelled, stored, used, transported, or disposed of, in an effort to prevent contamination.

That regulatory framework has changed as of recently. The specific rules for managing hazardous substances that affect human health and safety in the workplace have been transferred from the HSNO to hazardous substances regulations under New Zealand’s Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA). In turn, the responsibility for administering those rules has also shifted to WorkSafe New Zealand.

Businesses should know the new duties that these regulations place on them. For one, as of December 2017, regulations place an expectation on all those working with hazardous substances to know what those substances are. Moreover, PCBUs, including their senior officers, are now officially on the hook for the following broad requirements for hazardous substances in the workplace:

• Managing risk.
• Keeping an inventory of all hazardous substances in the workplace.
• Keeping a safety data sheet for every hazardous substance supplied to the workplace.
• Labelling every container of hazardous substances in the workplace.
• Properly packaging every hazardous substance in the workplace.
• Maintaining up-to-date signage.
• Preparing emergency response plans.

Asbestos management: a pocket guide for firms 

As historically high per-capita consumers of asbestos, Australia and New Zealand have both made aggressive moves in the last few decades to regulate the use of the hazardous substance, up to and including total bans. Regulations in both jurisdictions directly tackle the public and work health and safety risks posed by the hazardous substance. The following section gives firms an abridged asbestos management guide.

• Asbestos awareness. If firms manage, or are in control of, a workplace, they have a responsibility to protect anyone that works with asbestos by keeping an asbestos register and management plan, controlling asbestos in the workplace, providing the correct trainings and licenses (for workers who might come into contact with asbestos, as well as upholding competency requirements for removalists and assessors), in addition to monitoring workers’ health. 
• PCBU responsibilities. In many jurisdictions, workers must not handle asbestos (and equipment use should be limited) unless they have been trained and hold a license that is current and appropriate for the type of work being done. PCBUs must not carry out or allow workers to carry out work involving asbestos unless permitted by regulations. PCBUs must also ensure that appropriate health monitoring, beginning with four weeks, is provided to employees carrying out work with asbestos. PCBUs must ensure that workers engaged in work with asbestos are trained in the identification and safe handling of asbestos and ACM.
  
  For asbestos-related work, PCBUs must assume asbestos is present or arrange for a sample to be analyzed  to confirm if asbestos or ACM is present. If asbestos is present, PCBUs must give information about the health risks of asbestos to a person likely to do asbestos-related work.
• Risk management. For firms, managing the risks associated with asbestos involves identifying asbestos and ACM (asbestos-containing materials) at the workplace and recording this in the asbestos register, assessing the risk of exposure to airborne asbestos, eliminating or minimizing the risks by implementing control measures, reviewing control measures to ensure they are effective. PCBUs need to also consult, cooperate, and coordinate activities with other duty holders to protect any persons with potential exposure to asbestos.

The business challenges of efficiently managing hazardous waste

Compliance with work health and safety regulations isn’t the only challenge firms face when it comes to efficiently managing hazardous substances. Here are some common challenges:

• Lack of visibility and collaboration within teams. For one, companies tend to suffer from a lack of visibility and collaboration within teams, which creates serious misalignments throughout organizations. Usually, Property Services is responsible for identifying and removing hazardous materials, while a separate entity, often an external specialist contractor, will be called in for hazardous waste removal. But still another function, Work Health and Safety, will actually bear the full, regulatory consequences of worker exposures. By law, it’s WHS that must have access to relevant information on the matters that can affect the health and safety of their workers, for example asbestos exposure data and the asbestos register.
  
  Too often though, Property Services and WHS aren’t in sync, especially during the crucial discovery and identification stages. That’s when the teams must collaborate efficiently to understand the scope of the problem, prioritize removal (when there is a lot of hazardous waste,) and determine an underlying budget for hazardous waste removal.
• Economic factors. Additionally, the cost of removing hazardous substances, especially multiple substances at once, can be prohibitive. Teams will need to collaborate in order to prioritize removal, create a risk matrix to mitigate exposure, as well as put a range of controls in place (prior to removal).
  
  What’s more, the firms that undertake hazardous waste reduction strategies can face significant economic burdens, stemming from the cost of research and development required prior to implementation of new waste management technologies, capital investment required for new raw material or additional equipment, energy requirements and the potential for energy recovery, possible decline in process efficiencies, and general waste management cost increases.
• Penalties and prosecution. To enforce compliance, most regulators wield the threat of financial penalty and senior officer prosecution. For instance, in most jurisdictions, it’s an offence to export, import, or transit hazardous waste to, from, or through the jurisdiction without permit. In Australia, the maximum penalty is up to $1,000,000 for a firm or up to five years in prison for an individual. 
• Limitations in software. The asset management or risk management technologies most companies use to manage hazardous waste aren’t sufficiently granular to record all (or even most) of the information a firm will need to efficiently manage hazardous waste in compliance with work health and safety statutes. That is, of course, when companies actually adopt technological solutions and don’t merely rely on manual tools, like Excel.

What business can do to enhance their hazardous materials management processes

For firms, stricter regulations may seem daunting, but all is not lost. Quite the opposite. Introducing cleaner production methods and upholding safer workplace standards might actually produce intrinsic economic benefits, in addition to saving businesses on waste disposal costs. To begin recouping those benefits, firms will have to improve their hazardous waste management processes; and here are some strategies: 

• Develop consistent identification protocols. Identifying whether a substance is in fact hazardous will often require (third-party) specialist knowledge. Even if firms have to outsource the identification function, they should maintain a consistent process for determining whether waste is indeed hazardous. 
• Use a waste management hierarchy to guide decision making. Discovering hazardous waste might create confusion and cloud effective decision making. For companies deciding on the best method for managing waste, consider adopting the following hierarchy of decision making: 
  – Eliminate the production of hazardous waste. 
  – Where elimination is not possible apply methods to reduce the quantity or hazard involved. 
  – Minimize the amount of waste for disposal by recycling, reuse and/or recovery, including the recovery of energy, which may be available from the waste.
  – Treat waste to stabilize, immobilize, contain, or destroy hazardous properties.
  – Dispose of residues with a minimum of environmental impact. 
  – Appropriately contain, isolate, and store hazardous waste for which acceptable treatment or disposal option isn’t available. 
• Adopt cleaner production methods (where possible). Companies should also adopt cleaner production methods as a precautionary approach to the prevention of hazardous waste generation. Measures will include:
  – Substituting hazardous materials used in specific processes with non-hazardous materials and changing processes that have led to hazardous waste production in the past.
  – Reducing the amount of hazardous materials used.
• Keep a detailed record. In most jurisdictions, PCBUs that handle hazardous waste will be required to maintain consistent records through the hazardous waste life cycle. Consider systematic record keeping not only a means of dealing more efficiently with regulators but also as a way to develop a set of internal best practices.

Investing in hazardous waste management technology: Vendor considerations

Indeed, adopting hazardous waste management best practices can take time, especially if your firm relies on manual processes. But many of the software solutions available on the market, especially those tailored to asset or risk management, aren’t flexible enough to provide the level of detail required for managing the hazardous waste life cycle. So when considering a technological solution, make sure it provides the following two benefits above all else: 

• Mitigates exposure. The solution should allow for core health and safety reporting as well as for proactive mitigation exposure.
• Enables collaboration and greater accountability. Property Services and Work Health and Safety will tend to be the primary stakeholder teams when it comes to hazardous waste management. Therefore, make sure that the solution offers an intuitive, single integrated platform that tracks both at the asset management and risk exposure level. 

How Noggin OCA helps in hazardous waste management

Noggin OCA gives businesses an integrated, risk and work health and safety management solution that helps firms remain in compliance with hazardous waste regulations and achieve positive ROI. Fully accessible to cross functional teams and senior stakeholders, the system provides the following benefits.

• Enables health safety managers to maintain overall awareness of hazardous materials across their operations, by site and by workers.
• Facilitates risk management by prioritizing the removal of hazardous materials, such as asbestos across sites.
• Enables owners to track specific locations within the site, apply multi-layer risk profiles, categorize asbestos (and other hazardous materials) laboratory results, assign tasks for contractors to implement controls or remove high-risk asbestos.
• Efficiently manages PCBUs and contractors removing the asbestos.
• Mitigates future legal liability by tracking asbestos exposure.
• Manage, asbestos removal projects based on risk and priority from start to finish.

As multiple jurisdictions move to strengthen their work health and safety regimes in regard to hazardous substances in the workplace, firms must remain proactive to mitigate the threat posed by hazardous waste as well as remain in compliance with evolving regulations. To that end, this guide has attempted to help PCBUs manage their duty of care, by laying out new statutory requirements, detailing common challenges, and examining technological solutions. Adopting the measures endorsed in this guide will help firms mitigate risk, reduce cost, reach compliance, and ultimately achieve a competitive advantage in their industries. 

Citations

i     Workplace Safety & Health Institute: Global Estimates of Occupational Accidents and Work-related Illnesses 2014. Available at https://www.wshinstitute.sg/files/wshi/upload/cms/file/Global%20Estimates%20of%20Occupational%20Accidents%20and%20Work-related%20Illness%202014.pdf.

ii     William Ivan Glass, Rob Armstrong, and Grace Chen, Centre for Public Health Research, Massey University: Banning Asbestos in New Zealand, 1936-2016, an 80-Year Long Saga. Available at http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/12/1457.

iii     Australia, in particular, has registered a nine percent increase in hazardous waste, despite an overall downturn in the heavy industries that historically produce the most waste. New wastes and industries are driving these increases, while most jurisdictions and firms still struggle with so-called legacy wastes, old, intractable waste problems that persist due to shortcomings in infrastructure, technology, regulation, or the market economy.

iv     Matthew Soeberg, Deborah A. Vallance, Victoria Keena, Ken Takahashi, and James Leigh, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health: Australia’s Ongoing Legacy of Asbestos: Significant Challenges Remain Even after the Complete Banning of Asbestos. Available at http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/2/384.

v     Department of the Environment and Energy: Hazardous Waste in Australia 2017. Available at http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/291b8289-29d8-4fc1-90ce-1f44e09913f7/files/hazardous-waste-australia-2017.pdf.

vi     Norman Thom, University of Auckland: The Management of Hazardous Waste. Available at https://nzic.org.nz/ChemProcesses/environment/14B.pdf