Industry profile · NAICS 562920
Removal of recyclable materials from a waste stream
Workplace injury rates across 374 OSHA-reporting establishments in this industry, 2016–2024.
- 374
- Employers
- 5.0
- Avg TCR
- 2.6
- BLS benchmark
- 4,481
- Injuries
The industry picture
Employers in Removal of recyclable materials from a waste stream average 5.0 recordable injuries per 100 workers, 1.9 times the BLS national benchmark of 2.6.
- 5.0
- avg TCR · reporting employers
- 2.6
- BLS national benchmark
- 374
- employers reporting
- 4,481
- recordable injuries
OSHA-reporting establishments skew toward larger, higher-hazard sites, so the reporting average runs above the BLS all-establishment benchmark.
What Removal of recyclable materials from a waste stream Safety Data Reveals
The Removal of recyclable materials from a waste stream sector (NAICS 562920) encompasses 374 distinct employer establishments currently reporting to OSHA's Injury Tracking Application. Across this cohort, workers have logged 4,481 recordable injuries during the 2016–2024 reporting window, producing an industry-weighted average Total Case Rate (TCR) of 5.0 injuries per 100 full-time workers per year. Because OSHA's ITA mandates submission from establishments with 250+ employees plus all high-hazard industries at 20+ employees, this dataset represents a structural slice of U.S. workplace risk rather than a voluntary sample.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a separate national benchmark TCR of 2.6 for this NAICS code, derived from the BLS Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses. Comparing the two, the ITA-reported rate of 5.0 is higher than the BLS benchmark, a gap that typically widens when the industry contains many large, high-exposure establishments required to file ITA reports. Employers in the table below are sorted so you can see how far individual establishments deviate from both the industry average and the national benchmark.
The practical value of industry-level safety data is threefold. First, jobseekers can gauge whether a prospective employer is better or worse than its industry peers, not just absolute injury counts, which tilt toward larger payrolls. Second, insurers and workers' compensation carriers use sector TCR as a baseline for experience-modification adjustments. Third, safety professionals benchmark their own programs against the cohort median. Use the grade-sorted employer list below to identify specific establishments within Removal of recyclable materials from a waste stream that outperform or underperform the sector average, and click through to each record for year-by-year injury, illness, and fatality breakdowns.
Employers in this industry, by injury rate
Page 3 of 10Safety grades are a transparent derived index PlainSafetyScore computes from public OSHA and BLS data, not an official OSHA rating. Read our methodology - how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.
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This sector averages 5.0 against a BLS benchmark of 2.6 - but individual employers span the full A-to-F range.
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- Learn what an A-to-F grade requires within an industry benchmark. How grades work
Sector figures use the credible-subset mean across reporting employers; a benchmark is not any single establishment's measured rate.
Every figure and grade on PlainSafetyScore is computed directly from OSHA's published Injury Tracking Application data and BLS industry benchmarks, no number is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these safety grades, or report a data error. Data current as of 2016-2024 OSHA ITA release.