A Nantwich recycling company has been fined £93,000 after a 24-year-old worker was seriously injured when he was dragged into machinery.

The worker, who has not been named, was dragged into an unguarded conveyor at Nick Brookes Recycling Limited on 8 August 2013, resulting in his right arm having to be amputated up to his shoulder.

Chester Crown Court heard this week how an investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that the conveyor belt was in an extremely poor condition and that access to it was possible by the lack of a guard.

The employee was working on an ‘infeed conveyor’, which transfers waste brought by skip wagons onto a picking line.

Witnesses told the court that the conveyor was jamming frequently prior to the incident and that there was ‘a lack of information, instruction, training and supervision’ put in place by the company for its employees.

After pleading guilty to breaching section two of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the company, based in Green Lane, Wardle, was fined £80,000 and ordered to pay additional costs of £13,000.

Speaking after the hearing, HSE Inspector Adam McMahon said: “Had the company assessed the risk, implemented the correct control measures and guarded the machine, then the horrific incident could have been prevented.”

Waste industry health and safety

The waste industry has previously been branded one of the most dangerous to work in, with the most recent HSE statistics for the waste management industry in the UK recording five fatal injuries to waste workers and six to members of the public in 2014/15. In the last five years, there have been 33 worker deaths in the waste sector.

The HSE figures suggest that 1,879 employer-reported non-fatal injuries occurred in the waste sector in 2014/15, almost 70 per cent of which were due to either slips, trips, falls or being struck by an object.

Between 2010/11 and 2014/15, an average of 5,000 cases of non-fatal workplace injury have been reported in the waste sector each year. This represents 4.1 per cent of all workers, twice the all-industry rate of 2.0 per cent.

Further information is available in the HSE’s ‘Statistics on fatal injuries in the workplace in Great Britain 2015’.