Successful health and safety culture with Northpine
Industry
Location
Courses
- Certificate in Occupational Safety and Health (Level 3)
- Health and Safety Representative – Stage 1 (Essential Training)
- Health and Safety Representative – Stage 2 (Advanced Training)
- Managing Contractor Health and Safety
- NZ Certificate in Workplace Health and Safety Practice (Level 4)
- NZ Diploma in Workplace Health & Safety Management (Level 6)
“The mill dates back to the post-war era when everything was open and exposed.”
“I champion employee well-being while meeting industry standards.”
From saws, boilers and chemicals to forklifts, trucks and loaders, there is no shortage of health and safety risks for New Zealand timber manufacturers. With help from the EMA, Northpine Health and Safety Officer John Lumby tackles these dangers and creates a culture that stresses “safety first, safety last, safety always”.
Overview
Northpine Ltd is an award-winning timber manufacturer based in Waipu.
It was established in 1999 by Keith Reay, Richard Wilson and Bruce Larsen from the assets of the defunct Waipu Timber Company.
The original mill was built in 1946 and the current mill has been steadily retrofitted over the years, with the existing sawmill equipment being replaced with modern machinery, increasing production from about 25m³ per day to 115m³ today. That’s close to three 40ft shipping containers a day worth of finished timber.
Northpine timber products are made exclusively from sustainably managed radiata pine grown in Northland.
The timber is dried, dressed, treated and tanalised all on site, meaning its high-quality structural timber is immediately available to timber merchants, the public nationwide and in Australia and Asia-Pacific.
The journey to upgrade the old mill has naturally encompassed health and safety, and that has largely been the task of the Northpine’s Health and Safety Officer John Lumby.
“The mill dates back to the post-war era when everything was open and exposed,” says Lumby. “Along with Ian King, Northpine’s certified machine safety engineer and his team, we have been steadily retrofitting the guarding throughout the mill, but we’re still going.”
Critical Risks
With a background that includes dairy farming and petrochemical maintenance engineering, Lumby embarked on his first health and safety course with the EMA back in 2009 while working for Culham Engineering at Marsden Point Refinery where he became a safety rep.
In 2018, he became the Health and Safety Officer at Northpine, in charge of driving risk-management strategies that align with legislative requirements and fostering a culture of safety across the business of more than 60 people.
At the same time, he undertook a string of EMA courses to make sure he was up to speed on legislation and workplace safety strategies. These included the Certificate in Occupational Safety and Health (Level 3), Health and Safety Representative – Stage 1 (Essential Training), Health and Safety Representative Stage 2 (Advanced Training), Managing Contractor Health and Safety, and NZ Certificate in Workplace Health and Safety Practice (Level 4).
The NZQA-approved level 4 course was a five-month deep dive into the foundations of workplace health and safety; hazards, risks and controls; monitoring performance and event investigation; audits, reviews and safety culture.
That course leads into the NZ Diploma in Workplace Health and Safety Management (Level 6), which Lumby is currently on his way through. It’s a comprehensive nine-month course that allows practitioners to apply to NZISM and HASANZ for professional accreditation.
This qualification will make him about as skilled as a generalist in health and safety as anyone in the country. For his role, these skills are highly necessary as timber mills hold a number of very specific health and
safety risks, which Lumby lumps into three main categories.
“The main critical risks, or you could call them the life-changing risks, are fixed machinery, chemical management and the mobile plant.
“Machine safety is huge here. We’ve got a lot of exposures around our mill because we’re trying to retrofit, whereas the benefit with a greenfield-type operation is you can build your health and safety in right from the initial planning stages.
“We’ve got chemicals on site. We treat the timber here with CCA, which is nasty stuff.”
Copper chrome arsenate (CCA) is a water-borne solution of copper, chromium and arsenic. This treatment makes the timber highly resistant to pests and fungi, but it can also be toxic when handled or burnt.
“We have a boiler as well. So, we steam dry and treat the timber. So, that’s another major risk that we have to plan for,” says Lumby.
“Then we’ve got the mobile plant. That’s probably the third-biggest ticket. We’ve got a lot of forklifts, a lot of trucks, and a loader.”
Lumby’s training with the EMA helps him create collaborative risk assessments and tailored preventive approaches to these risks: “I champion employee well-being while meeting industry standards.”
Safety First
Northpine invests heavily in staff training and development. As Waipu’s largest employer it has school-leaver positions and commits to training and creating a career path for young workers.
“Day one at 7.30am you start with me,” says Lumby. “Depending on the position, you do a half day or whole day with a health and safety introduction, and we have a lot of documents and videos, then a site orientation before the job-specific training begins.
“By law, we have to provide training, supervision and instruction and we do that with our ‘standard operating
procedures’ content, which is a bit like a level-one unit standard.”
Using the frameworks and formats of EMA courses and those of trade-apprenticeship organisation Competenz, Northpine’s trained assessors take their learners through training that is tailored to the company’s unique setup and equipment.
“Northpine is traditionally a training organisation, and you won’t just be left to the inhouse training, you’ll be put on some career training too. I’ve sent some of the team on EMA training courses like Train the Trainer, Health and Safety Representative Stage 1 (Essential Training) and Managing Contractor Health and Safety.
“In my role, the high-level training of the level 4 and 6 courses helps me when I’m working with the governance team on strategic planning.”
In terms of EMA courses he feels have been most valuable for him, Lumby says the one-day Contractor Health and Safety was particularly helpful. “Sheree Camilleri was a fantastic tutor and she also took the Certificate in Workplace Health and Safety Practice. It was great to gain an understanding of overlapping duties and the legal issues around it.”
Overlapping duties mean more than one business can have health and safety duties in relation to the same task. Lumby says the course laid out the need for clear roles, responsibilities and actions so that everyone involved knows what work is happening and when.
In terms of the longer courses, Lumby plumps for his current Diploma in Workplace Health and Safety Management (Level 6). “It’s hands-down the most enjoyable course because, by that level, you want to be there. You haven’t been sent on a course by your boss.”
Upon completion, Lumby says he will have hit the ceiling of training that can be done as a health and safety generalist. But his interest in hazardous substance management could lead to specialisation in the future, particularly for the consultancy work he has started doing with his business Stealth Safety.
He was heavily involved in getting Northpine’s treatment plant compliant when the Hazardous Substances Regulations 2017 came into force, and that fed an interest in the topic, from chemical manufacture through to disposal.
Health and safety attitudes in New Zealand have been slowly changing, and Lumby feels like it has been taken much more seriously overseas in the past.
“Sometimes in New Zealand, we talk about health and safety like it’s just a box that needs to be ticked, then we can get on and do the job. In the likes Germany, Britain and Canada, you’ve got this concept that safety has to be inherently embedded.”
But he says the timber manufacturing industry in New Zealand now has a much better understanding of requirements with fixed plant and machinery.
“Northport is well along in its health and safety journey. Even though we’re an old mill, we’ve done a substantial amount of machine guarding and upgrading. The industry is much better than it was.”
