Dive Brief:

• Together for Safer Roads, a national fleet trucking safety organization, has partnered with the National Waste & Recycling Association to extend its fleet safety program to the association’s independent waste and recycling haulers. NWRA is searching for haulers with fewer than 100 trucks to join the new cohort.
• The FOCUS on Fleet Safety Training Program helps small and midsized fleet operators adopt best practices for improving their safety culture. The program has been in operation since 2022, but the NWRA partnership aims to target waste and recycling operators who often have time, personnel and resource constraints that larger operators might not have.
• Previous FOCUS trainings took place live, but TSR is working on an updated version of the program that can be completed in online modules, making the program more accessible and adaptable to independent operators’ schedules, the organization said.

Dive Insight:

The partnership comes as the waste industry is continually working to improve injury and fatality rates, including from crashes and deaths related to fleet vehicles. Waste collection was listed as the seventh deadliest job in the U.S. in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At the same time, NWRA members have been searching for safety resources that acknowledge the multiple roles workers must play in smaller companies, said Kirk Sander, chief of staff and vice president of safety and standards. “For the most part, if you’re a company with under 50 trucks, you don’t really have a dedicated safety manager,” he said. 

TSR works with businesses, community groups and government agencies to prevent injuries and deaths related to vehicle crashes, including through fleet safety programs, distracted driving programs and the promotion of in-cab dash cameras.

FOCUS is meant to be a flexible program independent haulers can customize to their operations and priorities, said Peter Goldwasser, TSR’s executive director. The program, which stands for “fairness, openness, capability, unity and sustainability,” covers aspects such as building a safety culture and understanding drivers’ perspectives and motivations. It also delves into strategies for collecting data, assessing leading and lagging indicators, selecting the right safety technology and other facets. FOCUS also offers executive coaching and benchmarking resources.

Ultimately, FOCUS aims to “really meet drivers and companies where they are,” Goldwasser said. “What does a safety culture mean for you, your drivers and your business and what does that look like?”

A previous version of the program required participants to log into live webinars, which Goldwasser said were hard for some participants to attend due to scheduling conflicts. “We still want the fleets all working together and learning from each other,” he said. “The idea was, how do we lower the barrier to entry?” 

A new “FOCUS 2.0” version will now allow haulers in the cohort to participate in recorded training modules on their own time, but still sets aside parts of the program where participants can collaborate with peers.

Establishing training that works for small and midsize fleets is important since they make up about 88% of all commercial fleets on the road, Goldwasser said.

Previous cohorts have included a mix of different types of companies from equipment rental groups to office furniture suppliers, as well as waste companies like Filco Carting and composting organizations such as GrowNYC, Goldwasser said. The NWRA-specific cohort will include companies that are all in the waste industry.

NWRA first partnered with TSR in 2020 in an effort to make more of the organization’s safety resources available to association members. Republic Services is on the global advisory group for TSR along with other partners like PepsiCo and UPS. Republic has endorsed the FOCUS program, which Sander said is an important way to show independent companies that the program understands how important fleet safety is to the waste industry. “We hope that can really help with engagement,” Sander said. 

Allowing fleet operators to connect with each other and share ideas can also go a long way in helping individual companies foster stronger safety environments, Goldwasser said. “Safety has to come from the top and the bottom and it has to be a collaborative process, or it doesn't feel authentic to that business. And that is really critical,” he said.