We've written elsewhere about the risks our collectors face — sharp objects hidden in improperly sorted waste, exposure to hazardous material, physical strain. It's worth going further and looking honestly at our actual safety record over time, including the incidents that didn't go well, since that record has directly shaped several practices we now consider standard.

Why we're discussing incidents openly rather than only successes

It would be easy to write only about the safety equipment we provide and the training we run, without acknowledging that we've had genuine injuries and near-misses along the way. We think an honest account is more useful, both to residents deciding whether to trust us with their waste and to other community organisations considering similar work, than a version that implies everything has always gone smoothly.

What kinds of incidents we've actually seen

The most common injury type has been cuts, typically from glass or sharp metal hidden in improperly segregated general waste, occurring despite protective gloves when a sharp edge penetrates through packaging in an unexpected way. We've also had a small number of incidents involving hazardous chemical exposure, generally from household chemicals disposed of in general waste without any warning, and, less frequently, physical strain injuries from carrying unusually heavy or awkwardly shaped loads.

What changed after our earliest incidents

Our current emphasis on segregation at source, and specifically our guidance asking households to wrap broken glass separately, traces directly back to early cut injuries that made clear how much collector safety depends on what happens before waste ever reaches a collector's hands, not just on protective equipment at the point of handling. Similarly, our e-waste and hazardous material guidance developed partly in response to specific incidents involving batteries and chemicals that hadn't been clearly identified or separated by the household disposing of them.

How our apprenticeship model connects to safety specifically

Our move toward a paired apprenticeship period for new collectors, discussed in more detail elsewhere, wasn't driven solely by service quality considerations — incident data suggested that new collectors in their first weeks, before fully internalising hazard recognition skills, faced meaningfully higher injury risk than more experienced staff. Pairing new hires directly with experienced collectors during this higher-risk early period has measurably reduced incidents during onboarding compared to our earlier single-session training model.

What we still consider an open challenge

Despite these changes, we haven't eliminated incidents entirely, and we don't think it's honest to claim we will, given that some risk is inherent to handling waste from households whose segregation habits, however much we encourage them, aren't always perfectly consistent. What we've focused on is reducing frequency and severity through better segregation guidance, training and equipment, rather than promising a risk-free outcome we can't actually guarantee.

How this shapes our ongoing safety investment

Protective equipment costs, covered through weekly collection fees, remain a fixed priority in our budgeting rather than something trimmed when other costs rise, precisely because incident patterns have shown us clearly what happens when that investment lapses. We also maintain informal, ongoing communication with collectors about near-misses, not just confirmed injuries, since near-misses often reveal a hazard pattern before it results in an actual incident.

What households can do to reduce collector risk directly

  • Wrap broken glass separately and clearly mark the package before setting it out for collection.
  • Never mix household chemicals, batteries or other hazardous items into general waste without flagging them separately.
  • Follow our standard three-stream segregation consistently, since well-sorted waste is meaningfully safer for collectors to handle than mixed waste.
  • Let us know directly if a specific item in your waste needs special handling or a warning for our collection team.

Why we track near-misses as carefully as confirmed injuries

A near-miss — a collector noticing a hazard just before contact, rather than after — often reveals the same underlying pattern as an actual injury would, without the cost of someone actually getting hurt. We've built a habit of collectors reporting these informally during our regular check-ins, which has let us catch and address a few emerging hazard patterns before they resulted in a genuine incident, rather than only learning from injuries after the fact.

Frequently asked questions

Have collectors been seriously injured while working for Kasarani Waste Solution?

We've had genuine incidents, mostly cuts from improperly sorted sharp material, which we take seriously and have used to directly inform safety practice changes rather than treating as unavoidable.

What is the most effective thing households can do to protect collectors?

Consistent, careful segregation, especially wrapping broken glass separately and never hiding hazardous items like batteries or chemicals in general waste.

Has your apprenticeship training programme actually reduced injuries?

Based on our internal tracking, incidents during new collectors' first weeks have measurably decreased since introducing paired apprenticeship training compared to our earlier single-session model.

Read more about the people behind this work in our piece on everyday heroes: our waste collectors.