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Quebec company takes gold and bronze for safety initiatives

Don Horne   

News

Rain Carbon Inc. presented gold, silver and bronze medals to employees from its production facilities in Canada and Germany at the company’s inaugural Safety-First Awards ceremony in New York City.
In May, Rain Carbon announced the creation of the Safety-First Awards competition to encourage employees to recommend and implement new ideas, practices and processes that would result in a measurable improvement in workplace health and safety.
“Safety is our number-one priority, and our goal is to eliminate all recordable incidents, so I am very pleased that we received 31 entries from 11 of our 15 locations in this first year of the competition,” said Rain Carbon president Gerry Sweeney. “Many of the ideas were very good, and they will be shared across the company as best practices. Of the 31 ideas that were submitted, however, three clearly stood out as being superior.”
Gold medals were presented to the team of Simon St-OngeEric DenisPascal CabanaFrancois Dupuis and Marquis Lessard from the company’s polymer production facility in Candiac, Que. To help improve housekeeping at the plant, the team implemented POKA software, which allows employees to take pictures and make videos of poor housekeeping with iPads that have been provided to each department. Employees then share their pictures and videos using the POKA software so that corrective actions are taken, and the improvements are recorded.
Silver medals went to Carsten Holdermann and Christian Mende at Rain Carbon’s distillation and advanced materials facility in Duisburg, Germany. They equipped forklifts operating in the high-bay warehouse with a headlight that shines a blue spot on the floor several meters in front of the forklift, alerting people walking in the warehouse about a possible hazard.
The bronze medal was awarded to Yves Berthiaume at the Candiac plant in Canada. He developed a laptop-based system that allows operators to remotely shut down the reactors in the polymer production facility if an incident requires the control room to be evacuated.
“A safe workplace requires that we lead by example,” said Rain Carbon Chief Operating Officer Günther Weymans. “These eight employees, with their award-winning ideas, have embraced that concept – and in doing so, they are making Rain Carbon a safer and better place to work.”

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