Modern Mining August 2015

HEALTH AND SAFETY

Drug and alcohol testing now a necessity on mines Spurred on by increasingly stringent legislation, virtually all mines now put a huge effort into ensuring that they have comprehensive safety systems in place and that zero harm comes to employees. But the best systems in the world can be compromised if employees whose performance has been impaired by the use of alcohol or drugs are able to find their way into the workplace. To prevent this happening, alcohol testing and drug screening are now commonplace procedures on mines all over Africa – and certainly in the case of South Africa virtually a mandatory requirement. A company which can provide all the screening and testing equipment required is Pretoria- based ALCO-Safe, one of the market leaders in its field in Africa.

The popular Lion AlcoBlow high- speed testing breathalyzer.

A LCO-Safe has now been around for 43 years. Explaining its ori- gins, Rhys Evans, a Director of ALCO-Safe, says the company was founded by his father in the 1970s with its main activity being the manu- facture and marketing of weather instrumen- tation. The company also sold breathalyzers but this was very much the smaller part of the business, the only clients of significance in those days being the various police forces in the country. “By the 1990s, the weather instrumenta- tion business had weakened to such an extent that the decision was taken to focus on the breathalyzers, which were by then coming into much more widespread use,” says Evans. “This change of strategy proved successful and in 2009 the scope of the business was expanded to include drug testing and related services, a development which was largely driven by demand from our client base.” Although ALCO-Safe has clients spread over a range of industries, the biggest single market for the company is the mining sector – not just in South Africa but all over the continent. “Our products are in use at mines all over Africa,” states Evans. “In most African countries the mining legislation – in the case of South Africa the Mine Health & Safety Act – states quite spe- cifically that mines are required to ensure that their workers are not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, so we don’t have to justify or explain the need for our products. But we are operating in a crowded market – particularly when it comes to drug testing kits – so we do

need to market intensively to ensure that our customers and potential customers are aware of the breadth of our range and the quality of our products.” The issue of quality is important as tests have to stand up in disciplinary and (in South Africa) CCMA cases. That ALCO-Safe’s prod- ucts are indeed manufactured to very high standards is guaranteed by the fact that they are sourced from companies with global repu- tations in their fields – Lion Laboratories in the case of the breathalyzers ALCO-Safe sells and Alere Toxicology in respect of the drug testing kits it markets. Both companies are based in the UK (though both are ultimately US-owned). ALCO-Safe has enjoyed a particularly long relationship with Lion and ranks as its second biggest distributor internationally. Operating

Multi-panel drug test cups. These cups will provide indications from two up to ten different drugs.

August 2015  MODERN MINING  47