At Elementis, it is our policy to manage our environmental obligations responsibly, and with careful regard for sustainable development.

In our decision-making we seek to establish a balance between our financial growth targets and reducing our impact on the environment. Our twin goals are zero environmental incidents and a continual improvement in environmental performance.

In recent years we have successfully reduced the number of environmental incidents and we are working to ensure that this reduction continues. Our target for 2004 is zero environmental incidents at a level that requires reporting to the relevant regulatory authority. We have in place processes and procedures to ensure that minor spills and leaks are subject to a full incident investigation process, reinforcing our culture of zero tolerance of environmental incidents.

All three Elementis chemical manufacturing sites in the UK and the Elementis Pigments manufacturing site in China, have achieved third party certification to the international standard for environmental management systems (ISO14001). Our other sites operate similar systems.

As a result of these and other measures our environmental performance for on-going businesses has improved significantly in recent years with just five minor incidents occurring in 2003, down from eight in 2002 and 27 in 2001.

The following chart shows this improvement.

At Elementis, we classify environmental incidents into three tiers. Tier 3 covers all incidents that have a significant environmental impact or raise other concerns. There have been no Tier 3 incidents in the last two years. Tier 2 incidents are minor ones, where there may have been a technical infringement that needs to be notified to the regulatory authorities, but with no significant harm to the environment. Tier 1 is what could be referred to as an environmental 'near miss'.

There is no requirement to report Tier 1 incidents externally, as they are the most minor of incidents and there is no significant impact on the environment. Nevertheless, we have put systems in place to learn from these incidents. We place heavy emphasis on increasing the number of Tier 1 reports to give them visibility, hence giving us the opportunity to tackle their underlying causes and prevent more significant Tier 2 and 3 incidents in the future.

Environmental monitoring
Emissions to air, discharges to water and solid waste, together with energy and water consumption are monitored and reported by Elementis as required for permits or licences issued by regulatory authorities. Beyond that, we recognise the importance of using the data as a basis for further reductions in emissions, discharges and solid waste sent to landfill.

Emissions to air
Air emissions data have been monitored at most sites for a number of years. However, we began to report air emissions data on a standardised Company wide basis during the course of 2002/2003. As a result data for some sites are sparse and it is therefore too early to show trends. Future reports will include data which allow trends to be assessed.

We can however report a number of successful improvements to our activities in this area during the course of 2003. A major increase in production output at our Chromium plant at Castle Hayne, US, impacted emissions of the global warming gas carbon dioxide and of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and sulphur (SOx). Our overall level of NOx emissions reduced however, primarily due to improvements in control at our Chromium plant at Eaglescliffe, UK.

Our commitment to the environment continues on the next page >
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