Esteemed awards recognize individuals and organizations for exceptional safety leadership

DENVER, Sept. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Safety Council announced the recipients of the 2025 Green Cross for Safety® awards. Given during the 26^th annual Green Cross Celebration, presented by U. S. Steel, winners for each category were celebrated: safety advocacy, safety excellence and safety innovation.

Nine finalists for the three award categories were selected, reviewed and evaluated. The 2025 winners are:

Safety Advocate, sponsored by First Student – recognizes those who have made a significant impact on safety by raising awareness and bringing about change.

Amazon
Amid the national opioid crisis, Amazon is proactively equipping its North American operations facilities with the overdose-reversal medication naloxone. This initiative makes Amazon one of the first major companies to answer national authorities, non-profit leaders and public health officials' calls on employers to stock the life-saving solution in their facilities.

Amazon strives to strengthen its emergency response protocols, support its employees and hopefully inspire others to follow. Amazon advocated for other corporations to adopt naloxone programs by appearing at the White House's Save Lives from Overdose Challenge in October 2024, speaking on a panel at the 2024 NSC Safety Congress & Expo, and participating in national news coverage including the Wall Street Journal in September 2024. By the end of 2025, Amazon will have stocked more than 1,200 facilities in North America with naloxone and expanded training to include all 36,000 first aid, AED and CPR trained employees at those sites.

Emergent BioSolutions
In 2024, following over-the-counter approval and availability of NARCAN® Nasal Spray, Emergent began working with businesses to prepare for accidental opioid emergencies. Through outreach and education, Emergent sought to increase access to this potentially life-saving solution in workplaces including job sites, brick and mortar stores, airlines, hospitality venues and other locations, where emergency response tools such as AED kits are commonplace.

In its own offices and facilities, Emergent installed more than 40 opioid emergency wall units near first aid stations and AEDs and provided over 1,300 cartons of the product to its employees. In addition, Emergent's national awareness campaign, Ready to Rescue, has handed out more than 2,700 opioid emergency kits containing one carton of the product and educational resources across several college campuses and public venues. Emergent's goal is to normalize having naloxone on hand — like any other over-the-counter medications — and is making great strides in doing so. 

Safety Excellence, sponsored by Amazon – recognizes a corporation, coalition or organization that relentlessly pursued safety.

NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services
The New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) operates the largest municipal fleet in the United States, with over 28,500 vehicles, and assists with the oversight of a 10,000-vehicle NYC-contracted school bus fleet. DCAS adopted a New York City Safe Fleet Transition Plan (SFTP) in 2017. The SFTP formalized a set of best-practice vehicle-safety technologies for all NYC vehicles to prevent and mitigate crashes, in direct support of Vision Zero.  In 2014, NYC was the first city in the United States to adopt Vision Zero. DCAS has been a lead agency from the onset. The SFTP, which was developed in partnership with the US DOT Volpe Center, was updated in 2019 and then again in 2025.

DCAS announced in January 2025 that over 100,000 safety upgrades had been implemented through the plan including national leadership in intelligent speed assistance, truck sideguards, addressing visual awareness for trucks, and telematics.

The safety initiatives born out of the SFTP and its updates include implementing the country's largest adoption of active Intelligent Speed Assistance technology, which prevents a vehicle from accelerating beyond the speed limit or a speed set by DCAS and implementing the nation's first requirement for sideguards for the citywide truck fleet.

Safety Innovation, sponsored by Centuri – recognizes a researcher, corporation or organization that approached a long-held challenge and developed a transformative response to the problem.

Pugent Sound Energy
Remote monitoring with infrared camera technology has many benefits. The recent miniaturization of these cameras with the addition of software that not only detects anomalies but sends email alerts, has greatly increased their importance in the wind generation space.

Puget Sound Energy deployed SYTIS TC-90™ cameras in their wind turbine nacelles to enable them to get eyes inside the electrical enclosures and diagnose issues from a safe distance. This allowed PSE to both reduce the risks associated with electrical cabinet exposures and to keep potentially dangerous tower climbs to a minimum. Seeing heat issues before sending in technicians not only speeds up the process of dealing with the issues but, since this technology detects electrical problems in nascent stages, they help avoid catastrophic problems such as fires and arc blasts.

After their success in the nacelles, they deployed these cameras in the field to diagnose the root cause of converter failures where they quickly found success. PSE's belief is that these new systems will help move the industry away from calendar-based maintenance to long term condition-based maintenance and help keep technicians and thermographers out of direct contact with live electrical panels.

In addition to recognizing this year's award recipients, the Green Cross Celebration helped raise over $788,000 to advance safety and workplace health and wellbeing.

"NSC is honored to recognize these organizations for their leadership, innovation and dedication to safety," said Lorraine Martin, NSC CEO. "The impact of their work is far-reaching — protecting our workplaces and communities today and shaping a safer tomorrow. Congratulations to this year's Green Cross for Safety award finalists and winners, and thank you to each of them for their efforts to save lives."  

To learn more about the Green Cross for Safety® awards and other NSC awards please visit nsc.org/awards.

About the National Safety Council
The National Safety Council is America's leading nonprofit safety advocate – and has been for over 110 years. As a mission-based organization, we work to eliminate the leading causes of preventable death and injury, focusing our efforts on the workplace and roadways. We create a culture of safety to not only keep people safer at work, but also beyond the workplace so they can live their fullest lives.

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©2025 National Safety Council

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