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August 2015
MODERN MINING
47
HEALTH AND
SAFETY
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
Drug and alcohol testing
now a necessity on mines
The popular Lion
AlcoBlow high-
speed testing
breathalyzer.
Multi-panel drug test cups.
These cups will provide
indications from two up to
ten different drugs.
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.