The safety of our employees, contractors, visitors, and the communities we serve is our top priority. Safe For Life is GFL’s in-house, comprehensive health and safety program that implements our Corporate Health and Safety Policy.
At its core, our Safe for Life program is designed to empower our employees to make safe choices and to provide them with the training they need to complete all tasks safely.
As a testament to the quality of our safety programs and efforts of our employees, in 2024, we lowered our Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) for the fourth straight year since issuing our Sustainability Action Plan and improved it by 10% over 2023.
In 2024, we have continued to expand and improve our fleet automation program. This program uses technology to help our employees reduce manual labor on collection routes and encourages drivers to identify route challenges and safety hazards. Additionally, over 65% of our solid waste vehicles have camera technology installed, allowing us to coach and train our drivers’ behavior out in the field more accurately.
Every day our more than 9,000 drivers are the face of GFL to our customers and our communities. Our drivers work to deliver our services safely and efficiently and often go above and beyond in their efforts to look after the communities they serve. In December, Lamar Radford, a Roll-off Driver with our Tallahassee, Alabama operations, spotted a house fire while on his early morning route. He immediately sprang into action, stopping his vehicle to alert the residents of the house and neighbours to the fire and calling emergency services. Thanks to Lamar’s quick actions, the residents escaped the fire. We thank Lamar and all our drivers for embodying what it means to be Safe for Life.
We are always proud to highlight employees that receive recognition from their peers. In 2025, the National Waste and Recycling Association (NWRA) honoured GFL employees Chris Girard and Niel Hansen both with Driver of the Year awards. We congratulate Chris and Neil on this great accomplishment.
To quote Chris in his acceptance speech, “If you aren’t working for GFL, you’re working for the wrong company.”
To help us understand what matters most to our employees, we completed our first employee experience survey in 2024. We were pleased to see 63% of our workforce share their voices and opinions to help shape the future of our workplace.
In response to the feedback we received, we are introducing several new initiatives. These include quarterly recognition programs to celebrate contributions, live regional town halls and newsletters to promote transparency, expanded leadership development opportunities, and structured focus groups for ongoing dialogue.
We plan to conduct our next employee survey in 2026 and every 2 years after that to provide our employees the opportunity to give us ongoing feedback and help us to measure the success of the actions we are taking in response to survey results.
We also advanced our rollout of our online Learning Management System, the GFL Learning Hub, which offers e-learning, in-person, and virtual training tailored to the diverse needs of our workforce. In 2024, we launched the Learning Hub across 10 of our collection operations, expanding to another 20 post-collection and maintenance locations beginning in 2025. Today, approximately 20% of employees have access to and have already completed over 500 hours of training. We plan to continue expanding the system until it reaches all of our locations, ensuring that our employees have the tools they need to keep learning and growing.
Our employees drive our sustainability efforts, which is why we began creating Employee Sustainability Committees (ESCs) across our footprint. Open to all GFL employees, these committees provide learning, engagement, and opportunities to volunteer on environmental and conservation projects in the communities we serve.
In 2024, we achieved our goal of establishing 18 ESCs. We will continue to support existing groups while encouraging new ones to form. The Our Communities section of this report highlights some of their initiatives from the past year.
