How to Face Your Toughest EHS Challenges Head On in 2015: An Interview with Gary Jones

In what seems to be a forever-changing regulatory landscape, employers can only imagine what new EPA and OSHA requirements they will encounter in 2015. How can you avoid serious fines, negative publicity, and serious injuries from EHS violations? For managers, business owners, or anyone involved in EHS in the printing industry, those are just a few of the many concerns that can keep you up at night. But if there’s one thing we do know about your job going into 2015, it’s that the stakes are going to get higher and the rules more complicated.

Gary Jones, Assistant Vice President of EHS Affairs at Printing Industries of America, has experienced his share of sleepless nights too, usually because he is traveling from state to state helping printers solve serious EHS challenges. We caught up with him in between a print consulting project and a key EPA meeting to talk about the crucial EHS issues facing industry companies today and important regulation changes they need to prepare for.

You’ve led several significant EHS consulting and compliance auditing projects for printing operations this year. Can you tell us about some of the latest ones you’ve been working on?

Gary Jones: Our team has been busy on a number of projects this year, both on the environmental and health and safety front. For many of the environmental projects, we’re helping operations with obtaining air permits as well as their compliance record keeping and reporting. Most printing companies don’t realize that if you purchase new equipment or if the regulations change, they may need to apply for an air permit—even small companies. While the thresholds vary from state to state, many of them have dropped to very low levels. In fact, in certain areas every piece of equipment that emits pollution must now have a permit.

On the health and safety side, companies are concerned with the fallout of the printing industry being declared a high-hazard industry for amputations. OSHA has been targeting printing companies and focusing on how they are protecting employees from machine related hazards which include machine guarding and lockout/tagout procedures. In fact 78% of OSHA inspections in the printing industry for fiscal year 2014 were planned or targeted inspections. This shows that OSHA has clearly become very aggressive regarding inspections in the printing industry.

Can you describe the top issues you see for members in the EHS field going into 2015?

GJ: OSHA’s new reporting requirements, effective January 1, 2015, will be a game changer. Employers will be required to report any work-related incidents that result in an amputation, loss of an eye, or in-patient hospitalization of one or more employees within 24 hours to OSHA. Any fatality must still be reported within eight hours.

How does this revised requirement differ from the current requirements?

GJ: Before this revision, employers were only required  to report a work-related injury hospitalization of three or more employees and did not even need to report an amputation or loss of an eye. Importantly after this revised requirement goes into effect, OSHA will act on the reports and they can and will most likely trigger an inspection. In addition, these reports will now be made publicly available by being posted on the OSHA website for customers, employees, and competitors to read.

In what ways can you help members meet the new requirements and remain competitive and profitable?

GJ: We have many resources available to help printing companies learn about and meet EPA and OSHA’s requirements. For example, to help companies know when to report an injury under OSHA’s revised reporting requirements, we developed the “When to Report a Workplace Injury” decision tree. It is included in an article that will be published in the December 2014 issue of our member magazine Printing Industries of America: The Magazine (Member login required). Any member company that has EHS questions or would like to schedule a compliance audit may contact me directly at gjones@printing.org or 412-259-1794.

What have been some of the toughest cases you’ve faced and what were the outcomes?

GJ: We have recently run into two lockout/tagout consulting projects that have been challenging because of the number of pieces of equipment each operation was using. Since we also perform employee training, we devised a unique plan of attack that included training many equipment operators on three separate shifts. We were able to complete the training—and stay under budget.

What can printers do now to improve their EHS standards and avoid penalties?

GJ: The biggest piece of advice I give to companies is to be proactive. It is much harder to put a program in place after a company has already been penalized for a violation or after a serious accident occurs. But when you have your core programs in place, you are far better prepared to avoid penalties, many of which can be large!

More EHS resources to prepare your company for 2015:

• EHS Affairs Consulting Services
• EHS Regulatory Compliance
• About OSHA
• Green and Sustainability
• Or contact Gary Jones by clicking here.