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Topics on this page:
Safety for Employees and Partners
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Local safety programs
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Safety at all sites
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Safety for suppliers and service providers
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Systematically reducing risk
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Promoting safety awareness
Safety for Employees and Partners
We have committed ourselves to promoting and maintaining safe working conditions to protect the health of our employees. Safe plants and qualified staff are important for ensuring smooth production, and form the basis for the trust the public places in our company.
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Local safety programs
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 Groupwide. 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.
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Safety at all sites
In order to achieve our goal, we pay particular attention to three points: ensuring that our managers act as role models, the systematic risk assessment of work processes and individual tasks, and enhancing safety awareness among our employees. We employ local programs and measures developed and implemented according to the specific needs of individual sites.
We also take steps in good time to ensure occupational health and safety: For example, we have a nanotechnology guideline that provides a basis for the responsible use of nanomaterials. This helps to further increase the already very high safety awareness among our employees.
We also use seminars and training events to raise safety awareness in other regions. And we develop new methods and equipment to ensure the safety of our employees, as shown by the following example from Ludwigshafen. Residual liquid can constitute a risk for employees when they have to open pipes for service, maintenance or installation work. To close this safety gap, BASF's occupational safety and materials engineering units worked with an external partner to develop a new mobile testing device. This makes it easy to determine the level of liquid in pipes and containers from the outside before they are opened.
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Safety for suppliers and service providers
We place great importance on the fact that all companies employed at our sites work as safely as we do. At our site in Nanjing alone, we have to date trained more than 100,000 employees of suppliers and service providers employed in the construction and startup of the site. Our requirements for health, safety and environmental protection are increasingly part of contracts with other companies.
At our Ludwigshafen site, we have summarized all important aspects of working for BASF in a short and simple form in new site regulations and a new safety guideline that covers everything from awarding contracts to assessment of suppliers. In Ludwigshafen, we also carry out regular checks to ensure that employees of suppliers andservice providers are familiar with our rules for safe working practices. This has proved successful: Whereas only 72 percent of those polled passed the safety test at the outset, the figure had risen to around 80 percent after two years.
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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.
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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.
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