Toronto garbage collector GFL improves safety grade

City and company's efforts to improve GFL safety included the firm hiring more staff and having weekly safety meetings.

Thestar.com
April 15, 2015
By David Rider

The company that collects Toronto household waste west of Yonge St. has improved its safety record, regaining a “satisfactory” rating from the provincial government.

In March 2014, the Star reported that Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation had downgraded GFL Environmental Inc.’s rating to conditional.

Its “overall safety violation rate,” based on a complex formula, was 76.2 per - well above the 70 per cent satisfactory threshold and worse than more than 99 per cent of commercial vehicle operators in the province.

At the time, GFL and the city’s solid waste department said the rating was affected by collisions in 2012 involving GFL drivers getting to know the routes after they took over curbside collection from city crews.

The city helped GFL develop a “work plan” for improvement and predicted the rating would rebound, something that has in fact happened.

GFL improved its company-wide safety rating to 59.4 per cent for the two-year period ending March 13, 2015, provincial records show.

The company’s 692-truck fleet had 274 collisions and 45 convictions while travelling 17.5 million kilometres in Canada.

Patrick Dovigi, GFL’s chief executive, said in an interview: “We’re happy. We have a satisfactory rating and we’re going to keep pushing for a world class safety rating.”

Beth Goodger, the City of Toronto’s solid waste chief, said: “We’re satisfied that GFL has put the necessary measures in place,” to improve safety.

Those measures include hiring additional staff, weekly safety meetings and a “zero tolerance” approach to unsafe practices, Goodger said.

The city has improved the provincial safety rating for its entire fleet to 35.9 per cent, she said. Goodger said she does not have a breakdown of the rating just for city crews that pick up household waste east of Yonge St.

In last fall’s election, John Tory promised to expand private household waste pickup to the entire city. In January, however, he supported the public works department asking city staff to study the issue, and said the results might make a valid case for the status quo.

Asked for a response to GFL’s improved safety rating, Dave Hewitt, acting president of CUPE Local 416, said in an email: “We believe that services such as solid waste management are better, more accountable and more responsive to the community when directly delivered and operated..."

“Keeping the service in-house ensures scarce funds are spent directly on providing the service - not on monitoring to ensure private operators abide by the terms and conditions of the contracts they sign.”