The managing director and former operations director of a recycling firm have been handed prison sentences and the company fined £800,000 after failing to prevent an operative from being drawn into a conveyor, along the line through a trommel and into an industrial waste shredder.

Latvian Karlis Pavasars was working for Mid-UK Recycling at the firm’s Barkston Heath site near Ancaster in Lincolnshire when the incident happened on 19 July 2013.

A maintenance fitter who died after he was trapped in a conveyor used a spare safety key to access a guarded enclosure and work on the machinery while it was still powered up.

Precast concrete products manufacturer CPM Group was fined £660,000 after 43-year-old fitter Jeffery Baulf was fatally crushed when the conveyor started moving as he was carrying out maintenance work at the company’s plant in Frome, Somerset on 3 October 2016.

Mark Goodge had been using an emery cloth to clean by hand steel shafts on the lathe at Marcantonio Foods’ factory in Barking, Westminster Magistrates’ Court was told.
Goodge’s gloves became entangled in the lathe and his lost four fingers on his right hand, broke several bones in his left arm and sustained a dislocated wrist.

Managers and company directors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter could face longer jail terms in cases where they have disregarded employee safety to save money, under new proposals published by the Sentencing Council. 

The draft guideline covers four types of manslaughter.

Coventry-based Beckett’s Foods was fined this week at Coventry Magistrates’ Court. The court heard that on 11 May 2016, a 22 year old worker was loading meat into the machine, when he fell and his hand was drawn into it.  The worker suffered serious injuries to his hand, later requiring surgery and skin grafts.

The HSE found that the company failed implement a safe system of work for separating the meat using this machinery, and that it had failed to provide the appropriate level of guarding to protect the workers.

Whirlpool has revised its procedures for co-ordinating contractors’ work after a fire alarm engineer died when he fell from a work platform.

Dalley was standing on an elevating mobile platform between two of the carriage baskets suspended from the conveyor. Maintenance workers could not see Dalley from the conveyor’s control panel in the middle of the factory. They started the conveyor and one of the carriage baskets caught on the platform, toppling it. Dalley fell to the ground, sustaining fatal injuries.

A bakery that did not fit machines at its Penrith, Cumbria site with the correct guards has been fined £70,000 after two workers sustained injuries to their hands. Carlisle Magistrates’ Court was told that a Bells of Lazonby employee lost the top of his middle finger on his right hand on 26 January 2016 after it caught the moving blade of a dough dividing machine. 

Bedmax Limited failed to protect its employee from dangerous parts of machinery. On 26 October 2015 Philip Eyers was operating the log deck, which is part of a machine that shreds trees, when his foot slipped and became lodged in a gap exposing him to the wheels of the machine which conveyed the logs. The severity of the injuries to his toes meant his big toe was cut back several times, his other four were fractured and eventually reconstructive surgery was required.

A packaging manufacturer has been served a reduced £297,000 fine after a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspector uncovered poor, longstanding practices involving electrics and machine guarding at the company’s premises in Northfleet in Kent during September 2014. Under the sentencing guidelines the court could have set the penalty as high as £2.5m but the company’s poor trading position and swift remedial action led to a more lenient sentence.