Safety is the driving force behind everything we do for our customers at Envalior. The Envalior motto is “I care, we care” because we don’t want to see anyone have an incident on our sites. We share this message with visitors, contractors, and employees.

Many companies pay attention to what is called EHS: environmental, health, and safety. At Envalior, we have flipped the term to SHE: safety, health, and environmental, to more accurately reflect how we prioritize safety first.   

As a Envalior manufacturing partner, you also benefit from our dedication to safety. Safe productions lines keep running—they do not suffer from shutdowns caused by injuries or other safety incidents. That helps ensure a steady, consistent flow of high-quality product to you, our customers, so that you can keep your own production lines up to speed.

A safe facility means that we gain a low Workers’ Compensation experience modifier, which helps us control our operating costs to the benefit of our customers.

In addition, as a safe company, we are able to attract and retain the best workers—people want to work here because they know we take their safety seriously and that our safety programs and training have total support from our management team.   

Plant modernization provides new safety opportunities

As an example of our dedication (some may say obsession) with safety, we recently had a build-out that added three new lines to better serve our manufacturing partners at our Brighter Evansville, Indiana, high-performance materials compounding plant.  

Much time and attention was devoted to safety, even before the actual project began. We planned and designed for the safety of our employees and the contractors who were going to be working on the project. It was imperative to us that all hazards and risks were identified and mitigated prior to any work being performed. We accomplished this through many different methods, including hazard and operability studies, machine safety assessments, explosion risk assessments, and safe powder handling, just to name a few.

The new lines in Evansville include safety features such as autostranding, palletizing, and tow motor safety. Autostranding eliminates the risks caused by workers needing to interact with molten plastic to start up a line. On Evansville, the new equipment automatically strands the lines for the operators.

Our highest ergonomic risk at the site is when we have 25kg bags of our thermoplastic pellets to be palletized. Robotic palletizers will now stack all the bags on the skids, take them to be stretch wrapped, and then deliver them to the lift truck to be picked up.

In addition, there will be no powered industrial trucks inside the new building. All the material will be moved either by an electric pallet jack or a walkie stacker machine. This will separate forklifts from pedestrians.

The beginning of the build-out at the Evansville facility in 2019 corresponded with the onset of the COVID pandemic, adding additional layers of safety concerns to the construction project. As is our culture, we ensured the safety of our employees and all the construction contractors working on our site (at the peak of the project, more than 100) with numerous protocols. These included implementing a mask mandate across the site, conducting temperature screenings at the entrance gate, allowing employees who could work remotely to do so, limiting conference room capacities, and providing separate bathrooms and lunchrooms for each contracting group so there was no cross-contamination across the site.  

Our ongoing training goes above and beyond what’s required

There are OSHA and EPA training programs that all companies are required to implement, but at Envalior we supplement those programs with our own ongoing safety training. We continually work on our safety culture to make sure that we're always improving and focusing on the right things.

We are proud of how our employees, contractors, and visitors have embraced our safety culture. Envalior’s safety expectations definitely exceed those of most industries in this area, and yet everyone is more than willing to comply. We think that speaks volumes to the dedication of everyone working here.

Our manufacturing partners can rest assured that if we are putting this much focus on the safety of our employees, we are going to put that same kind of focus on the quality of the products that we provide to our customers.

We sincerely appreciate the ongoing hard work of our colleagues in Evansville and the global operations team to make the Evansville facility project a reality. We look forward to its anticipated completion in 2022. I encourage anyone with questions to reach out to their account manager or contact us.