Bottle-Making Company Fined Thousands After Worker Injured Permanently
Published June 15, 2017 at 1:16 am
A bottle manufacturing company has been fined heavily after one of their workers was permanently injured last year in Brampton.
A bottle manufacturing company has been fined heavily after one of their workers was permanently injured last year in Brampton.
O-I Canada Corporation has a principal place of business at 777 Kipling Avenue in Toronto, and a glass manufacturing facility at 100 West Drive in Brampton, where the worker was injured.
Two workers were at the industrial site on February 27, 2016 – the victim and a machine operator. They were working on a machine known as the Individual Section (IS) bottle making machine.
Sections on an IS machine are identical and adjacent to one another. Each section can start or stop independent from another. The machine forms molten “gobs” of glass at a dangerously high temperature of 1,200 degrees Celsius.
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When the injury occurred, the worker and the machine operator were performing a standard procedure, inspecting bottles and changing neck rings and plungers.
When the worker was removing rings from the front of the machine, they lost sight of one of the rings.
Subsequently, the worker asked the operator to close the mold so that the worker could reach in to retrieve the lost ring. It was when the worker reached in that the mold moved from closed to open, pinching the worker’s hand between the mold and the shaft for a few minutes.
A co-worker switched the mold to closed after the incident, and the worker was able to remove their hand. However, they suffered crash and burn injuries that required surgery and resulted in permanent injury.
Following a Ministry of Labour investigation, it was found that the defendant failed to take effective precautions to ensure that control switched and mechanisms were locked to prevent the starting of mold-opening motion that could endanger a worker.
As such, O-I Canada Corporation failed as an employer to ensure that the measures and procedure prescribed by Ontario’s Industrial Establishments Regulation were carried out at the workplace.
O-I Canada Corporation was fined $100,000 on June 13, 2017.
The court also imposed a 25-per-cent victim fine surcharge as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.
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