Occupational safety is key. Employees and workers need to be able to feel safe at their workspace and get appropriate instructions and training accordingly. In addition, the prevention of downtime, lost work days, production stops and employee motivation have direct economic impacts on the company. The efforts for the prevention of workplace accidents are an essential component of production activity for Clariant. The goal is always »zero accidents«. To this end, the program AvoidingAccidents@Clariant led to a significant reduction of accident numbers and consequences in the past years.

The success of these activities and the associated efforts resulted in a decline of workplace accidents (with a downtime of at least one day) from 79 accidents in 2010 to 32 accidents in 2015. At the same time, downtime caused by accidents decreased. The »Lost Time Accident Rate« (LTAR) decreased in the aforementioned time period from 0.45 to 0.17 (social key indicators).

AvoidingAccidents@Clariant allowed a distinct group-wide safety culture to come into being. The introduced measures demonstrate success and are rigorously improved and implemented. With the additional recording of all safety deviations, conclusions are expected to be drawn from potential risks that have not been considered up to the present. If the corresponding measures are developed in the process in order to reduce and avoid risks, the number of actual accidents will once again decrease.

Every month, the accidents and safety deviations that occur within the company are published with a corresponding analysis and assessment. This practice allows for the exchange of knowledge acquired from accidents and safety deviations, the correction of behavior and operation (where necessary), and the promotion of a preventive mindset throughout the entire company. Locations that use the same equipment and the same processes can in this way benefit directly from active safety measures and prevent the recurrence of accidents or incidents.

The health of Clariant employees is examined on a regular basis. Depending on the workplace, sometimes extensive health checks are carried out in order to detect signs of illness as early as possible. For some activities, special health certificates and vaccinations are required, and attention is paid to ensure that these are used correctly and complied with.

High degree of plant safety

The production locations of Clariant in Germany are subject to the requirements of the German Hazardous Incident Ordinance; the European locations are subject to the EU Seveso II ordinance; and the non-European locations are subject to comparable regulations. In this manner, the corresponding reports are created in which the safety management system and the system-related measures for safe plant operation are described. The proprietary guidelines of Clariant are updated in the event of significant changes, or every five years at the latest.

Every release of a substance, each explosion and each fire with actual or potential impacts on the health of the employees or people in the vicinity, and with damages to equipment and the environment, as well as the release of harmful substances above the established threshold quantity, are systematically recorded, assessed and reported. In addition, in the past, Clariant developed a plan from the analysis of hazardous incidents, with which the recording of occurrences even below the official regulatory threshold of the obligation to report is supported.

The safety of people and the environment is of paramount importance for chemical companies. To guarantee this safety, it is imperative to have an effective process safety management that identifies risks in the production process, assesses and monitors risks through suitable measures, and reduces or even completely prevents risks. An important part of this system is the recording, analysis and assessment of process disturbances of such occurrences. So that the chemical industry as a whole can benefit from this knowledge, this may not be done from company to company or even within the companies in a varying manner. For the comparability and assessment of hazardous incidents in kind, scope and impact, a uniformly implemented system is required.

Recording of safety-related incidents

The system of the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC), which supplements the processes that were introduced based on the Seveso guidelines in the European Union, guarantees a comprehensive comparability of process disturbances. With this system, occurrences that can lead to a substance or energy release are uniformly and properly recorded. In this manner, the process and plant safety can be assessed with the help of the hazardous incidents recorded, the Process Safety Incidents (PSI). The system records unintended releases of energy or substances that exceeded certain threshold values.

The vast majority of the released substances can be collected with the corresponding retaining systems. The predominant number of incidents is to be traced back to misconduct. Through the recording and assessment of safety-related incidents, the task is now to identify and implement suitable measures to prevent such incidents. Luckily, considerable operational disruptions are very rare at Clariant – which is the result of continual work by participating function owners, especially operations managers, operations engineers and safety experts.