Health & safety

Elementis is committed to preventing harm to people and the environment

Elementis is committed to preventing harm to people and the environment in a sustainable way. Good performance in protecting the health and safely of our employees, contractors, customers, neighbours and the general public, and for the environment in which we operate allows the Group to focus on developing, manufacturing and selling its products without the cost, in both human and financial terms, of accidents and incidents.

Working towards an injury-free work environment

Our principal measure of performance is recordable incidents. Recordable incidents are workplace injuries and illnesses that require medical treatment beyond first aid. An important sub-set of these is lost time accidents ("LTAs"), which forms another performance measure. Given the low frequency of LTAs we use recordable incidents as our standard measure.

In 2008, as a result of effective design of working practices, strong management and safe behaviours, we were able to limit recordable incidents to just nine globally. This includes the performance of the two acquisitions made in July for the period in which they were under our ownership.

The Total Recordable Incident Rate for the year was 0.73 per 200,000 hours worked (2007: 0.65). Given the low number of incidents the slight increase is not considered statistically significant. Based on American Chemistry Council statistics, our rate of less than 1.00 recordable incidents per 200,000 hours worked continues to rank with companies that are generally viewed as 'best in industry'.

Using the UK Health & Safety Executive's definition of LTA (greater than three days lost, excluding the day of incident), two of the recordable incidents were classed as LTAs in 2008 (2007: two). Over the years the rate has reduced to 0.24 LTAs per 100,000 hours worked.

Our goal remains zero recordable incidents, with continual improvement in the health and safety of our employees leading to year on year improvement in safety performance.

Contractor safety

Elementis regards the safety of contractors working as being of vital importance. Contractor safety management practices are adopted to ensure that contractor safety is treated equally with employee safety.

Community well being

Elementis aims to promote the safety and well being of the communities in which it operates.