At least 60 people have died in industrial accidents in the last decade in plastics processing factories, according to a review of federal government records.
The dry, matter-of-fact descriptions of the deaths can be sobering, both for their details and for showing how quickly a seemingly normal workday can go wrong.
One employee at an ABC Polymer Industries plant in Alabama, for example, was cutting materials on a fast-moving extrusion line in 2017 when she "was pulled into the machine and was crushed when caught between the webbing and rollers."
In another incident detailed in Occupational Safety and Health Administration reports, an employee at a Winpak Portion Packaging Inc. plant in Illinois in 2018 was killed when he was pinned between sections of a thermoforming machine. The employee was working on a three-person crew troubleshooting the press and adjusting a vacuum pump.
"The employee was caught and pinned between the two sections and was found unresponsive by co-workers before being transported to a local hospital, where he later died," OSHA said.
Electrocution is another common cause.
The owner of Meridian Precision Inc., a small custom extrusion firm in Pennsylvania, was doing maintenance on a shredder and conveyor system in June 2020, but it was still plugged in and energized to 480 volts, the OSHA reports said.
The 68-year-old "cut a wire in the cord plug using a pair of wire strippers. He was electrocuted and was killed," OSHA said.
The OSHA records show that electrocution and crushing injuries are some of the most common causes of workplace fatalities in plastics processing.
Officially, the OSHA records show 73 workplace deaths since January 2011 for plastics processing, measured by the North American Industry Classification System for plastics products manufacturing.
A few of the incidents cover deaths from natural cases that happened at work, like an employee having a heart attack. But more than 60 are fatalities caused directly by industrial accidents. That figure is likely an undercount, when you add in plastics processing firms that are listed by the government in other NAICS codes.
The OSHA fatality numbers fluctuate from year to year. The agency's records show 13 deaths in 2013, the most in the decade, and 10 each in 2016 and 2017. But they showed only two in 2019 and five in 2011 within plastics processing.
Sometimes the deaths bring large OSHA fines and lawsuits.
The OSHA review of the accident at ABC Polymer in Helena, Ala., in August 2017, for example, was closed in August 2019 with a $155,000 fine for the company. That included $103,000 for one "willful" violation of machinery safety standards and smaller fines for violating lockout and tag-out rules, OSHA records show.
In that incident, the employee, Catalina Estillado, was working on an extrusion line when OSHA records say she was pulled into the machine and crushed between webbing and rollers.
A lawsuit filed by her husband, Crescencio Pablo, said it appears Estillado was cutting away broken filament that had wrapped itself on the rollers when she became entangled.
Pablo's lawsuit said the machine was in an "unreasonably dangerous condition" because it lacked an electronic barrier guard linked to the machine that would have automatically slowed down the rollers from the 70-feet-per-minute speed they operated at.
Pablo's lawyer said Estillado, who was also identified in court documents as Eva Saenz, was following her training.
"She was cutting a wrap as she had been trained to do," said William Traylor, with Yearout & Traylor PC in Birmingham, Ala. "The machine was operating at production speed. If the guard had been installed and maintained as designed, the death would not have [occurred]."
A trial is set for late August in Alabama state court in Birmingham.
The structure of the court case is a little complex.
Pablo originally sued the company and two managers, but ABC Polymer was dismissed from the lawsuit because workers' compensation laws can provide companies with broad immunity. That left the case to proceed against the managers.
ABC Polymer and lawyers for both the company and the managers did not respond to a request for comment, but in court filings in June, the two managers urged a judge to dismiss the case. They argued that the lawsuit had not shown any "willful conduct" on their part that contributed to the accident.
They said they did not remove any safety devices and were not given information about any such barrier guard when ABC purchased the equipment secondhand in Europe and moved it to a factory in Mexico before ultimately shipping it to Helena.
The equipment was originally manufactured by the Italian company Faré SpA.
"The evidence tends to show that [defendants] were not provided with such a device or such information upon ABC's purchase of the Faré equipment," their filing said.
They told the court they trained employees on safety measures and installed other safety equipment on the machine.
The ABC managers said employees were trained to find a co-worker who would press the machine's emergency stop button while they removed broken materials, but they said Estillado did not do that.
"Since the accident, no employee has been injured working on the [machine]," they told the court. "Prior to the accident, there were no catastrophic injuries from working on the [machine]."
But Traylor said they have testimony from Faré that the machine was originally made with an interlocked safety guard.
In a 2018 news release when OSHA first announced its investigation and fines against ABC Polymer, the agency said it was proposing a "willful" violation for the firm for failing to provide proper machine guarding from caught-in hazards and amputation.
"This company's failure to install machine guarding equipment has resulted in a preventable tragedy," OSHA said at the time.
OSHA records are replete with incidents of employees being crushed by equipment.
One such situation, a March 2018 death at blow molder KN Platech America Corp. in Shelbyville, Ind., prompted the firm to make major changes, a company executive said.
In that case, a 47-year-old machine operator and parts packer died when he was troubleshooting a press and it restarted, crushing him, OSHA records show.
The operator's co-worker had turned the machine off and the operator went into the mold area to start removing plastic.
The co-worker waited for the operator to step back a few feet and announced he was restarting the machine but "did not have a clear view to the mold area when facing the control panel," OSHA said.
The press area was being protected by a metal yellow fence, but "the employee stepped back into the press mold area as the press started," OSHA said.
In the two seconds it took for the mold to move back into position, the "mold struck and crushed the employee against the protective metal yellow fence. The employee was killed," the OSHA report said.
OSHA closed its case two months later and the company paid a $7,000 fine.
Hiroyuki (Keith) Kayashita, president of KN Platech America, said that the factory made a "substantial effort" after that incident to improve safety, including changing senior leadership, bringing on a safety manager and adopting new procedures.
Kayashita said he replaced the previous president in April 2019, and the plant manager also left the company shortly after the incident.
The factory, which is jointly owned by two large Japanese companies, also put in place more safety audits, education and new procedures, as well as stepping up employee involvement in safety, he said. He said he traveled to the factory monthly from Japan after the incident and moved to Indiana in October 2018.
"We are very sorry for the survivors and loved ones affected by this incident, and we have implemented a safety-focused operation," Kayashita said. "Our focus was to change our company culture."
He said he would advise other companies not to think of any factory floor incident as minor.
"I assume we might have many minor issues on the floor before this incident," he said. "We shall not ignore nor think any incident is minor."
The company wants to create a "safety-first culture" and communicates to staff that safety is more important than other things, including financial results, Kayashita said.
"We are confident our working environment is substantially better," he said.
Electrocution can also be a common cause of death in plastics factories.
In 2020, for example, three of the eight fatalities in OSHA records for plastics processing plants happened when people came into contact with electrically charged equipment.
Besides the June incident at Meridian Precision that killed that company's 68-year-old owner, Bernie Kulkaski, employees at PVC pipe maker Lasco Fittings Inc. in Brownsville, Tenn., and Centrex Plastics LLC in Findlay, Ohio, were also electrocuted last year.
All three companies either declined to comment or did not respond to questions.
At Lasco, OSHA records said a 30-year-old maintenance worker had been troubleshooting an injection molding machine the morning of June 26, investigating why water was getting into parts during manufacturing.
OSHA said a 480-volt power supply for a parts conveyor had become pinched in a metal frame, and when the employee leaned over to close a water supply valve, he made contact with the metal frame and was electrocuted. The agency said the pinched wire "energized the metal frame of the parts conveyor to between 140 and 170 volts AC."
The case was closed in December with the company paying $8,575 in fines, OSHA records show.
In the third electrocution case last year, a 43-year-old maintenance technician at Centrex was cleaning electrical wires on a molding machine in May. Another employee found the maintenance worker on the ground behind the machine, unresponsive. Medical personnel pronounced him dead.
OSHA said there were broken wires on the molding machine and an autopsy found electrical burns on his left hand.
That case was closed in January, with Centrex paying $24,000 in fines for violations of lockout/tag-out and training standards, OSHA said.
Safety consultant Bruce Main said workplace deaths can leave a lasting impact in factories.
The consultant, who is president of Design Safety Engineering in Ann Arbor, Mich., said he's seen plants where a fatality is still felt by a company and its employees more than a decade later.
"Some of those facilities, 15 years later, they still have a memorial bulletin board or a reminder that scrolls across this video screen about someone who passed away 15 years ago in an industrial accident in our facility," Main said.
There are different approaches aimed at reducing workplace injuries and deaths.
Main, for example, advocates that companies do detailed risk assessments of their work processes, particularly talking to employees about why tasks are done in certain ways as a way to identify less visible risks and solutions.
The National Safety Council advocates focusing on near-miss incidents. It says that for every major workplace injury, there are 29 minor incidents and 300 that could have resulted in injuries. It argues that analyzing near misses can yield valuable information to prevent more serious problems.
NSC has also been vocal about what it says is a lack of progress in reducing accidental deaths in U.S. workplaces.
The Itasca, Ill.-based group launched a "Work to Zero 2050" initiative in 2019 aimed at eliminating the roughly 5,000 workplace fatalities annually in the U.S. by 2050.
It noted that nonfatal injury rates in U.S. job sites have been dropping — a trend also seen in plastics processing — but it said that workplace deaths have been more stubbornly resistant to improvements.
"While workplace injuries are trending down, workplace fatalities are rising," NSC said last year when it issued a report, Safety Technology 2020, that examined tech solutions to reducing workplace deaths.
In launching its "Work to Zero" initiative, the organization noted how a fatal accident on the job can traumatize both a company and the family members of the victim.
NSC said it can also mean lost productivity for the firm and months of "disbelief and confusion" for co-workers.
Main said fatalities lead to a lot of thinking at companies he's worked with. They linger long after the official investigations are done, he said.
"OSHA comes in and writes a citation and tries to help companies improve the safety of the operations," he said. "Once that file is closed, they go away, and what remains are the people who actually think about and know their co-worker or their employee.
"They think, 'Well, what could I have done? What could have been done to prevent it?'" Main said. "That's a real personal impact that is not really accounted for in the statistics."
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