Overview

Safety, Health & Environment

Safety, Health and Environment (SHE) Excellence forms a critical part of Manufacturing Excellence and its application through the sharing of best practices is also delivering substantial benefits.

Lucite International believes passionately that excellence in Safety, Health and Environment performance is fundamental to the success of its business. This applies as much to the way the business markets and sells its products and brands as it does to manufacturing and procurement.

Very high levels of performance have been achieved and sustained. Our goal is zero injuries, illnesses and incidents and minimising environmental impact that may be associated with the conduct of our business.

Injuries requiring medical treatment

injuries/100,000 hours worked for employees and contractors combined

Safety, health and environmental improvement in Lucite International is driven through the SHE Excellence program. The program is based on the principle that sustainable world-class performance must be underpinned by world-class practices, and that management effort and passion must be focused on identifying, sharing and implementing these best practices. The Company regularly re-evaluates its world-class benchmarks based on published data and uses this information to set tougher performance targets. The success of the program can be demonstrated by continued improvement in safety performance. The SHE Excellence program has been applied to three acquisitions since 1996, and all three sites involved have experienced a significant improvement in safety performance as measured by the dramatic decline in the number of injuries.

Current performance is amongst the very best when compared to companies of our type, and is more than ten times better than the European and US chemical industry average.

Prevention of occupational illness is as important to us as the prevention of injury that's why health protection programs are in place at all Lucite International facilities. These programs are tailored to ensure that the health of each employee is regularly monitored in specific relation to the hazards to which they may be exposed throughout their working life with the Company. The workplace is constantly monitored to minimise exposure to potential hazards and employees have access to the very best health facilities and advice. In addition to health protection, positive health and wellness programs are in operation across the Company. These are run by groups of employees and health professionals to promote healthy lifestyles and offer advice on a range of health issues together with voluntary health check-ups.

Mandatory SHE standards, include requirements to operate SHE improvement plans at all facilities, are fully documented within SHE Excellence and are regularly upgraded to match best in class. Emissions from processes have been reduced substantially in recent years. Soil and groundwater protection is a key requirement, with sites operating rigorous leak prevention programs to progressively eliminate all unplanned losses of containment alongside comprehensive inspection and preventative maintenance programs for SHE-critical equipment.

There is also a requirement to assess the environmental implications of the manufacture, use and disposal of new and existing products. In this respect, durability is an important benefit of acrylics. Inherent durabillity enables products to be used for long periods, which helps to reduce the generation of waste associated with replacement. In addition, products made from acrylic are amongst the few that can be efficiently recycled and chemically de-polymerised back to the original raw material.