Target's Toxic Fine Highlights Training Failure
Target Corp. (TGT) says it has a comprehensive, written policy on toxic-waste disposal. But Target is also being sued by the state of California for more than $8 million for illegal toxic dumping.
How could that happen? What we have here, as Strother Martin so famously put it in Cool Hand Luke, is a failure to communicate.
There's no doubt that somewhere up at Target's Minneapolis headquarters, there's a policy binder with a sheet on the company's accepted ways to dispose of toxic materials. It's a good bet the policy is very complete and detailed. Maybe it's even hung up on the wall in the breakrooms of every single store in the chain.
But a poster does not necessarily translate into correct action by store-level managers and low-paid hourly workers. What's missing here is training.
Toxic waste can mean a lot of things, and some of them may not be obvious to every employee. This list of what California considers a hazardous substance is more than 700 items long. Really living up to a toxic-waste policy means thorough training, offered multiple times each year for every store, identifying every product in the store that could be considered hazardous waste and teaching workers how to properly dispose of it.
Based on the lawsuit filing, the company has a long way to go. Among the allegations: That several L.A. County Target stores sent a total of 5,000 pounds of defective, leaking, products that were toxic, corrosive, or flammable off to a food bank as a "donation." The charity had to have the goods hauled away by a specialty hazard-waste handler at a $5,000 cost.
It's not as if Target was unaware its workers didn't understand the policy, either. Since 2001, GreenBiz reports, the chain has received 300 notices for violating California's hazardous waste-control laws.
Now, Target reaps the negative-publicity harvest created by its other policy -- the policy of ignoring warning signs that it needed to boost its training on hazardous-waste disposal.
Photo via Flickr user Simon Strandgaard
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