ROADS MEETING SAFETY AT AFPA 2021
SYMPOSIUM
THE AUSTRALIAN FLEXIBLE PAVEMENT ASSOCIATION’S ‘ROADS GOING FULL CIRCLE’ SYMPOSIUM WAS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR KEY PLAYERS IN THE PAVEMENT INDUSTRY TO SHOWCASE THEIR LATEST RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGIES. ROADS & INFRASTRUCTURE REPORTS.
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hen the Australian flexible Pavement Association (AfPA) released its Strategic Plan 20202022, health and safety were identified as key priorities in the industry peak body’s vision for the next 50 years. So it was that the first day of the AfPA 2021 Symposium, ‘Roads Going Full Circle,’ focussed on ways to improve health and safety within the paving community. Sponsored by Viva Energy, the virtual event brought together over 250 attendees on the first day. Matthew MacMahon, AfPA Chief Executive Officer, opened the Symposium by explaining why health and safety were strategic priorities for AfPA. “This is the Board strategic priority I am most passionate about. Our people deserve to be healthy and safely go home after a hard day’s work. This is what keeps me up at night and I am proud to lead an association that sees this as a priority,” he said. “The biggest safety risk areas for our industry remain: working under live traffic, working near mobile plant, burns and explosions; and the mental health of our people – in particular under these uncertain COVID times,” he added. TALKING ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH When considering the safety and wellbeing of those working within the pavement sector, mental health is often discounted or disregarded altogether in favour of the tangible aspect of workplace safety, namely the physical health. Wayne Schwass, former AFL player and a 22
ROADS AUGUST 2021
Wayne Schwass, former AFL player and a passionate advocate for mental health, engaged the audience in an interactive session.
passionate advocate for mental health and emotional wellbeing engaged the audience in an interactive session wherein he encouraged the attendees to talk about mental health candidly within their workplaces to help break the stigma around the issue. “One of the things that I’ve consistently heard and seen from people is that there’s this misconception that we need to be clinically trained [to talk about mental health] …It’s actually not accurate. We can be everyday Australians working in the road construction industry... Every one of us has the ability and the opportunity of being able to talk about these types of topics and why they are important,” he said. WORKERS’ HEALTH IN SPOTLIGHT Khoa Vo, Laboratory Manager at Fulton Hogan’s National Binders Laboratory presented a paper that investigates the use of sodium hypochlorite to reduce the
amount of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) gas released into the atmosphere when sulphur is used as a cross-linking agent in the manufacturing process of polymer modified bitumen (PMB). The results of these experiments have shown that sodium hypochlorite is a highly effective and economical method of reducing H2S produced in the manufacturing of PMB. It was also shown that traditional methods of negating odour in PMB plants were completely ineffective at stopping actual H2S from being released into the atmosphere. This, as Vo pointed out, should be an issue that PMB plants take into account as the uncontrolled and unmonitored release of H2S gas can have a significant effect on the health and safety of those within close proximity of PMB plants and also may significantly impact the environment. Ben Franze, a Materials Engineer with Fulton Hogan, explained why automated asphalt testing for the determination of asphalt bitumen content is a safer alternative to the AS/NZS 2891.3 methods currently used in day-to-day asphalt plants. A putative advantage of automated asphalt testing machines, he argued, is the reduced need for direct operator involvement, which has the potential to minimise operator exposure to hazards associated with currently used methods. A comparison of automated asphalt test machine with an existing test method by the team at Fulton Hogan had concluded that the automatic method reduced the duration of manual handling tasks by 30 to 45 minutes for every test.
