Safety program and performance
Continually Improving Our People and Process Safety
Continually Improving Our People and Process Safety
Safety first
One of Nouryon’s Values is ‘We do it right’ and this includes a culture of safety awareness to protect our people, contractors, customers, communities, and the environment.
Our Safety Ambition: Zero injuries, waste and harm
We have leading management systems in place to drive continuous improvement in safety, but we also believe that safety needs to be embedded in our culture at every level. To increase awareness and strengthen our safety culture, we proactively report on leading parameters such as near misses - an event which had no impact but had the potential to result in injury, ill-health, or damage to assets or the environment; and hazards - any condition or situation that could potentially harm people, products, or the environment.
In addition, we use a Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) program at all locations to identify unsafe behaviors and spark behavioral change of employees and contractors to reduce potential hazards in the workplace. These observations are performed regularly and in a structured way based on the location’s observation strategy. Once a year, we also organize a company-wide Safety Day, last held in September 2021, to promote safety awareness and strengthen its global safety culture.
We conduct internal audits on 100% of our sites at least once every 3 years for HSE&S.
49% Recordable incident rate decrease between 2018 and 2021
74% Process safety incident rate decrease between 2018 and 2021
Awarded 13 Responsible Care® Facility Safety Awards by the American Chemistry Council (ACC) in 2021
Top-quartile performer in people safety
As in recent years, our safety performance was acknowledged in 2021 by external organizations around the world. The awards included:
It is our belief that every injury is preventable, and we uphold an ambition to have zero injuries in the workplace. We have succeeded in reducing the number of incidents considerably over the years and our Total Reportable Injury Rate (TRR) ranks in the top quartile of American Chemistry Council members.
"We are proud to be a leader in people safety. Safety sits at the heart of
Nouryon’s success and it is essential for every one of us to take ownership of our own and others’ safety."
Charlie Shaver, Chairman and CEO
We established a Process Safety Management (PSM) approach for all operations in 2015, in alignment with industry standards and best practices. Our process PSM framework is designed to prevent incidents, and keep our facilities and people safe. PSM applies a management system and controls at all manufacturing sites, so that hazards are assessed, understood and managed.
In 2021, we continued to raise awareness and improve reporting of process safety indicators. As our performance in process safety has improved, we have shifted our focus to leading indicators, i.e., low impact events and systems that could lead to more serious events. We review all incidents and near misses on a weekly basis. The total number of incidents involving a (Levels 1 and 2) process safety event (PSE) decreased by 78% between 2018 and 2021.
Learn more - Nouryon's sustainability pillars