Dive Brief:
The City of Pittsburgh is pursuing a building deconstruction policy meant to spur the potential recovery, recycling and reuse of materials from certain city-owned condemned structures. Leaders say potential benefits of such a policy include removing blight from neighborhoods while decreasing waste sent to landfills, advancing climate action goals, and opening opportunities for job training.
Mayor Bill Peduto signed an executive order last week tasking the city with creating a process for identifying and assessing structures potentially eligible for sustainable deconstruction, with particular focus on historically Black business districts and low-income communities.
There are currently more than 1,700 condemned structures in Pittsburgh, said Sarah Kinter, the city s director of the Department of Permits, Licenses and Inspections. Pittsburgh will move forward with a pilot this year on deconstruction of city-owned properties, but also plans to create material recovery
Dive Brief:
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has released a free Worker Well-Being Questionnaire to help employers, workers, researchers, practitioners and policymakers better understand and target interventions to improve workers’ welfare.
The questionnaire measures well-being at the company, industry and workforce levels and looks at factors ranging from workplace culture to safety climate.
In addition to individual firms employing it within their own ranks, occupational safety professionals, public health experts and policymakers can use the questionnaire to monitor changes in worker well-being in relation to economic conditions, societal trends or changing governmental or organizational policies. Researchers and organizational consultants can also use it to assess the state of a working population before, during and after an intervention.