Conveyor Safety and the Return on Prevention

By Jerad Heitzler, Training Manager / Martin Engineering

Protecting workers should be the top priority for any employer, especially those on the front line of materials processing.  Beyond the substantial financial consequences of a workplace injury or fatality, the impacts are felt profoundly by an employee’s family, their coworkers, and the wider community.

Thus, investing in safe, well-engineered equipment and prevention-focused training that helps protect workers from injury or illness is essentially investing in people, company culture, and the community.  And Martin’s technicians are increasingly applying their expertise to help operators control maintenance risks by sharing their knowledge and installing equipment that improves safety. [Fig.1]

© Martin Engineering 2025
Figure 1 – Guarding restricts access and may require a specific procedure to unlock.

Although return on investment (ROI) is a common calculation when installing new conveyor accessories, some safety experts emphasize the return on prevention (ROP).  This long-term strategy prioritizes equipment with safety engineered into the design, allowing for more ergonomic servicing, faster and easier access, and other improvements that make maintenance less dangerous and more desirable to do.  Although safer equipment is typically a larger initial capital investment, the whole life return is in faster maintenance with less downtime, longer equipment life, and, importantly, a considerably lower chance of an incident, reducing the overall cost of operation.

The Real Costs of ROI

Calculating return on investment (ROI) on conveyor safety is specific to each operation, but in general, they can be broken down into “direct costs” and “indirect costs”:

• Direct costs are explicitly associated with an accident or illness.  In general, these include fines, medical bills, insurance premiums, indemnity payments and temporary disability payments.
• Indirect costs include a variety of other expenses resulting from the incident.  They include: [Fig.2]
  • Cleanup time and product loss
  • Equipment repair / replacement
  • Purchase / installation of safety components
  • Overtime to fill in for the missing worker
  • Cost of hiring, training and equipping new employees
  • Legal fees and litigation costs
  • Increased insurance premiums
  • Production delays and missed shipment targets
  • Reduced employee morale, greater absenteeism
  • Negative publicity
  • Increased scrutiny by regulators

© Martin Engineering 2025
Figure 2 – Direct and indirect costs of worker injuries and fatalities

The Price of Recovering From An Accident

To demonstrate the benefits of safety to a company’s bottom line, OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the USA) created the online tool, ‘$afety Pays’, which uses company-specific economic information to assess the potential economic impact of occupational injuries on that firm’s profitability.  The program estimates direct costs (claim cost estimates provided by the National Council on Compensation Insurance) and indirect costs (provided by the Stanford University Department of Civil Engineering) and weighs them against financial details supplied by the company. [Fig.3]

© Martin Engineering 2025
Figure 3 – OSHA $afety Pays Tool Example

Return on Prevention (ROP)

The commonly used ROI model calculates the time frame in which the capital expenditure on new equipment is recaptured through the improvements.  If a proposed project meets budget expectations and has a payback period of less than one year, plant management usually approves it.

Working with abstract numbers implicitly creates pushback, making it more difficult for safety-conscious managers to obtain approval for their proposals.  However, the hard costs of worker injuries and fatalities are very real.  The ROP model illustrates the direction and strength of occupational safety and health programs in helping to achieve company goals. [Fig.4]

© Martin Engineering 2025
Figure 4 – Equipment like the Martin® track-mounted belt cleaners are designed to pull away from the system for safe ergonomic servicing.

Conclusion

The death or serious injury of a worker is always tragic and can have long-term impacts for all those involved.  Investigations usually reveal that incidents could have been prevented with the right knowledge and behaviours, combined with practical and cost-effective safety improvements.  The ROP on durable, well-designed conveyor accessories and professional training makes good financial sense and can lead to a safety culture that ripples throughout the company’s balance sheet.

Martin Engineering has been a global leader in bulk material handling for more than 75 years, continuously developing new solutions to make high-volume conveyors cleaner, safer and more productive.  The company’s series of Foundations books is an internationally-recognized resource for safety, maintenance and operations training — with more than 22,000 print copies in circulation around the world.  The 500+ page reference books are available in several languages and have been downloaded thousands of times as free PDFs from the Martin website.  Martin Engineering products, sales, service and training are available from 18 factory-owned facilities worldwide, with wholly-owned business units in Australia, Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, the USA and UK.  The firm employs more than 1,000 people, approximately 400 of whom hold advanced degrees.  For more information, contact info@martin-eng.com, visit www.martin-eng.com, or call (800) 544-2947 / (309) 852-2384.