Altri Florestal has decided to take education to the work front, by means of a mobile classroom housed in a customised van where participants are taught about best safety practices at work

Some jobs are more prone to accidents than others. People who work in forestry know this only too well. Altri Florestal has around 120 forest suppliers spread around the country, from Braga to Monchique.

The company has always taken great care to provide frontline training to its suppliers’ employees. These sessions are held by field technicians, the people in charge of forest management. Whenever a job commences, training is given on the activity’s inherent risks and dangers to all employees of the subcontractors who provide forestry services, be they a planter or a machine or chainsaw operator. According to Pedro Serafim who is the head of biodiversity and forest certification at Altri Florestal, “everyone should have at least 30 minutes of training on all jobs.”

The training focuses on the most relevant aspects of each job and is given in situ. The goal? To ensure that everyone finds it much easier to internalise the message about the appropriate procedures to be implemented. Providing the information at the work front means that employees start their work on high alert. This has always been the preferred option, rather than providing more complex and lengthy training lasting one or two days, away from the working environment. The strategy has always been to favour training on the frontline.

Pedro Serafim says that these initiatives have helped to cut down on work-related accidents. He explains that “In the 10 years, we have had one fatal accident and an average of one occupational accident per year. We would like to drive these numbers down even further, although they are already well below the national average for accidents in the area of forestry”, and adds that they are doing what they can to ensure that no accidents happen in the workplace.

Altri Florestal has been providing training at the work front since 1998. It all began with quality management certification. Achieving ISO 9001 accreditation for its production of eucalyptus logs and pulp for paper incentivised the company to implement a quality management system whereby it promotes and monitors the continuous improvement of the organisation’s products, services and efficiency. The company ended up implementing the Integrated Forest Management System which resulted from the principles and criteria for forest management borrowed from the two most widely-adopted standards in the world (FSC® – Forest Stewardship Council® (1) and PEFC™ – Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification.

Under the remit of both these certifications, Altri Florestal encourages its partners and suppliers of raw materials to obtain accreditation, and provides technical support to help form and run producer groups, to ensure it buys certified timber.