Towards a green economy

caused by hazardous chemicals alone was estimated at 651,000. When taking into account compensation, lost working time, interruption of production, training and retraining, medical expenses, social assistance etc., these losses are estimated annually at 5 per cent of the global gross national product. Latest ILO estimates indicate that the global number of work-related fatal and non-fatal accidents and diseases does not seem to have changed significantly in the past ten years. One complication in manufacturing and ship-building is the distribution of occupational safety and health (OSH) obligations in the principal contractor–subcontractor relationship (ILO 2009).

The cost of industrial accidents represents a great source of public and private expenditure and social distress. Over the past three decades, a rough cost assessment of only a few of the major industrial accidents worldwide shows that a minimum of US$ 40 billion have been spent on addressing the damages. If smaller incidents are taken into account, the real economic cost is likely to double, while deaths and injuries would be on the scale of several hundreds of thousands. Some major incidents are listed in Table 4. Clearly, there are global benefits in human and environmental health associated with cleaner and safer industrial production, which has to be part of a transition to green manufacturing.

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