Anthony Burr founded Safety Pickets expecting builders to be his primary customers. The concreter turned founder designed a patented, reusable steel cap for star pickets—the steel posts Americans call T-posts—after years of watching plastic caps break and fly off housing sites. But civil and infrastructure crews began calling, and their reasons had little to do with house slabs.
On road projects, steel posts mark grades, stand beside live traffic, and are installed and pulled by the hundreds along a single stretch of road. Burr says that can make an exposed post more dangerous on a road job than on a typical building site, and more costly to manage. The first surprise for Burr was how civil crews use the posts. Before a road is built, crews drive star pickets into the ground to set heights and gradients. Those survey pickets usually end up close to the ground. “They would be using star pickets before they started to have a gauge of where the height was, which ended up being quite low to the ground,” Burr says. “So it was quite a risk for machinery and things like that as well, not just people, because they were out of eye line.”
That risk shows up in equipment costs as well as injuries. Burr says several crews have told him about popped tires and damaged machinery from running over exposed posts. A post that sits below an operator’s line of sight is easy to forget until a wheel finds it. On a housing site, the people walking around the posts are usually the ones who put them in. Burr says that awareness disappears once pickets sit beside a road for weeks or months. “Someone on a construction site that has put the steel post in themselves is aware of their surroundings and where they are,” he says. “If anything, it’s probably more dangerous for a pedestrian or traffic, because they don’t have that natural awareness.” He points to children, especially kids riding bikes near roadwork, as the group most likely to be caught off guard.
Plastic caps on hundreds of roadside posts need constant attention. Burr calls it a forever task: caps break, blow off on windy days, and have to be replaced, and someone has to keep checking which posts are exposed. “You almost need, not full time, but most of the day, someone needs to be aware of those posts, whether they’re exposed,” he says. The Safety Pickets cap uses a lock-in design that keeps it on the post. “Having it fitted on as part of the actual post, you remove that whole task,” Burr says. “It becomes irrelevant.” Using a conservative estimate of half an hour a day spent on caps at a typical Australian labor rate of about $30 an hour, Burr says the cost came to roughly $1,200 over three months. “And that’s if it’s only half an hour a day,” he says. “So that’s just one site, one area.”
Safety is the main reason crews switch, but Burr says the environmental side carries weight in civil work. A large civil company planning to move to Safety Pickets told him its project tenders must include an environmental component, and that some government projects are off limits without one. The firm saw reusable steel caps as an edge over competitors still using plastic. Burr estimates that for a heavy user, one cap keeps around one kilogram, or about 2.2 pounds, of plastic out of landfill over its life. On a project with 100 steel posts running a year to 18 months, that adds up to roughly 100 kilograms of plastic lost to breakage, wear, and replacement. That reusability sits at the center of Safety Pickets’ sustainability commitments.
Burr has started testing those ideas with US contacts. When he showed the cap to a staff member with about 30 years at a Florida roads department, the response was positive, and he was given a list of contractors to contact once the company is ready to launch in the US. He expects the case to be stronger there because of project size. “I feel like they’ve got more liabilities, the U.S. teams, because their jobs are a bigger scale,” he says. “The bigger the scale, the more money these things can cost you if they go wrong.” For road and civil contractors, the decision comes down to more than the price of a cap. It includes crew hours, equipment repairs, public exposure, and bid requirements tied to posts they already use every day.
