Safety management of the characterization activities of illegal dumpsites

Due to the ever increasing amount of industrial waste, illegal dumpsites have been spreading out both in well-being and developing countries. Therefore, research and remediation programs have been promoted worldwide in order to limit the negative impact on both the environment and public health of uncontrolled waste disposal. Accordingly, a great attention has been paid to environmental aspects of remediation activities in contaminated sites and a consistent legislative framework to deal with environmental concerns was stated. However, in such a context occupational health and safety (OHS) issues related to the operators that have to deal with the remediation activities of this type of sites are not considered sufficiently. As a matter of fact, planning suitable safety measures to prevent workers from injuries and professional diseases is essential. That is particularly true during the characterization activities, when workers can be subjected to the direct contact with the polluted environment and are not completely aware about the pollution’s entity and type. Hence, this study aims at reducing such a gap, providing a general framework to plan safety during characterization activities, starting from a case-study and the analysis of ISO 45001 approach.