The safety and health of our employees are very important to us. As a result we are continually working not only on maintaining but also on improving safe working conditions. Qualified, safety-conscious employees and safe plants are a prerequisite for smooth production.
Lost time injuries per million hours worked
(reduction compared with baseline 2002: – 33%)
In order to promote safety awareness and minimize risks, we focus on local programs and measures developed and implemented according to the particular needs of individual sites. Managers play a key role here. We expect them to act consciously as role models.
In 2007, the lost time injury rate in the BASF Group was 2.2 accidents per million working hours (2006: 1.7). This corresponds to a 30% increase compared with the previous year. There were two main reasons for this increase: In 2007, we included the accidents of employees from leasing companies for the first time in our reporting Group-wide. In addition, we included the businesses acquired in 2006 in our reporting for the first time.
Among employees of partner companies working at BASF sites, the lost time injury rate declined by 10% to 3.6 (2006: 4.0). We are updating our occupational safety goals to 2020.
We regret to report that a total of four fatal accidents occurred at our company and at partner companies in 2007.
2020 goal
We want to reduce our lost time injury rate per million working hours by 80% worldwide compared with 2002.
Systematically reducing risk
Accident analysis enables us to pinpoint potential weaknesses and to minimize or eliminate any risks. We are therefore introducing an incident database for the entire BASF Group in 2008.
Accidents, environmental incidents, transportation incidents and damage will be recorded in even greater detail and near-accidents will also be included in the database in the future. In addition, it will be easier for sites to report incidents.
Occupational safety is the responsibility of all our employees. We promote the safety awareness of our employees by means of regular company safety briefings, seminars and training courses. In addition, we offer computer-based training programs at many of our sites. The intensive experience-sharing among our safety experts from all regions of the BASF Group in the Responsible Care network also helps us to achieve our goal of accident prevention.
Promoting safety awareness
We started a new worldwide initiative at the beginning of 2008 due to the increase in accidents the previous year. We aim to further increase employee awareness with regard to safety and safe behavior, above and beyond technical safety measures. Our goal is to develop a new safety culture within the BASF Group. A central part of our activities is to strengthen open dialog. We will encourage discussions regarding safety issues, by means of additional workshops, particularly at the sites acquired in 2006. In doing so, we aim to further sensitize employees with regards to BASF’s safety awareness. We are focusing on constructive cooperation and the active involvement of all employees in order to reach our ambitious goal.
FOUR KEY POINTS WITH REGARDS TO OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY
- Managers act as role models
- Open communication regarding unsafe situations
- Systematic risk assessment of work processes and individual tasks
- Enhancing safety awareness among employees
