UK flexible packaging firm fined after worker injured by laminating machine

- Frith's Flexible Packaging fined £8,000 plus £2,000 costs after worked injured

 

- ‘HSE will not hesitate to prosecute companies who put their employees at risk in this way’

 

Frith’s Flexible Packaging, an Essex, UK-based packaging company, has been fined £8,000 after one of its employees sustained a serious hand injury on an unguarded laminating machine.

 

Employee Gary Dean had the skin on the palm of his left hand torn away in the incident at the company’s facility in Southend-on-Sea, on September 26, 2011.

 

Dean was using a glue laminating machine when he noticed an indent mark on a finished product. He put his left hand into the machine via an unguarded portal to scrape away dried glue residue from a roller that had caused the blemish, but his whole hand was drawn into the roller and the palm of his left hand was de-gloved.

 

He was hospitalized for two days and required emergency surgery, followed by several months of physiotherapy to regain movement between his thumb and first finger. He returned to work after two and a half months.

 

Frith’s Flexible Packaging is an operating company of AM Holdings, along with Macleans (Foils) and SF Williams.

 

Friths and Macleans are leading suppliers of printed aluminum foil products, and supply predominately into the confectionery and dairy markets. They specialize in printing on unsupported aluminum foil and various other substrates.

 

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigated the incident and found that Dean had removed an interlocked guard on the laminating machine some six years earlier to allow him to set the machine up more easily.

 

He and other employees, including his supervisor, had used the machine without the guard ever since.

 

HSE said that had the guard been in place they would have been unable to access dangerous moving parts, including the roller, while the machine was in operation.

 

HSE inspectors also found that, although a risk assessment and a safe system of work were available for the laminator, they were very basic, did not adequately set out the control measures or troubleshooting guidance and staff were largely unaware they existed.

 

Frith's Flexible Packaging was served an Improvement Notice by HSE to review their training plan, incorporating revised risk assessments and a safe system of work.

 

Follow-up enquiries revealed that a second laminating machine at the site had also had its guard removed, and that the company had failed to address this issue following Dean's incident.

 

As a result, HSE served another Improvement Notice for guarding requirements and a third requiring “competent person” training to enable the company to properly manage its health and safety responsibilities.

 

Southend Magistrates' Court fined Frith's Flexible Packaging £8,000 and ordered it to pay £2,046 in costs after pleading guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974.

 

HSE inspector Sam Thomson said: ‘This incident was entirely preventable. Guards are placed on machines for a good reason and should not be removed for convenience. The fact the offending guard here had been missing for a number of years is particularly disturbing.

 

‘Hand injuries from printing and laminating machines are a well-known risk within this industry, and the company had been given previous advice on similar guarding matters. So measures should have been in place to protect Mr Dean and other workers.

 

‘HSE will not hesitate to prosecute companies who put their employees at risk in this way.’

 

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