Safety

Safety

All safety data compiled in ESTER
Corporate health promotion: focus on mental fitness
Further digitalization in the areas of transportation safety and logistics

Protecting the health, safety, and employability of our employees and preventing accidents and incidents at work and in the operation of our production facilities are of central importance to Evonik. That is also reflected in the UN Sustainable Development Goals of relevance to Evonik. Our high safety standards aim to prevent fatalities, accidents, and damage to health and the environment. That includes both our employees and contractors’ employees during their working hours, during commuting, and during the transportation of goods. Another goal is to prevent Evonik releasing hazardous substances into the environment and to exclude damage to our production facilities resulting from inadequate safety precautions. We take into consideration both internal and external factors such as extreme weather, manipulation, and terrorist attacks.

Our ESHQE management handbook sets out our mandatory global rules on the environment, safety, health, quality, and energy. The aim is to continuously optimize our processes, plants, products, and services. That includes minimizing the undesirable influences of our activities on people and nature.

In the reporting period, we completed the introduction of ou ESHQ software, ESTER (Evonik Standard Tool ESHQ and Reporting) and continued our work to optimize it. ESTER harmonizes processes throughout the Evonik Group, makes workflows leaner, and broadens our database for evaluation purposes. That helps us improve our safety performance and makes it easier to learn from one another. All relevant indicators and reports are available in a central database (single point of truth). In addition, the most important data on our safety performance are available to all employees via an intranet dashboard.

Targets of Ester

Occupational safety

We have always paid special attention to occupational safety, which also includes both safety on the way to and from work and the safety of contractors’ employees working at our sites. The key performance indicator for occupational safety at Evonik is the lost time injury rate (LTI-R). In 2023, we once again achieved our target of remaining below the defined minimum LTI-R of 0.26 accidents involving Evonik employees 3 resulting in absences of at least one full shift per 200,000 working hours.

Plant safety

Safety is the basic precondition for the operation of our facilities and their performance. It is therefore the basis for reliable, effective, and future-oriented production. We set demanding safety standards for the entire life cycle of our plants worldwide. We regard safety as an all-round task, which is established worldwide through our safety management systems and regularly reviewed. Our PSI-R was 0.44 in the reporting period, so we failed to meet our target of remaining below the upper limit of 0.40. Nevertheless, the PSI-R was considerably better than in the previous year (0.49).

We’ve introduced a maintenance safety system based on a globally recognized standard as a systematic safeguard for safety-critical tasks. For example, it secures interfaces to pipes that have not been emptied and machinery that is connected to the power supply. This enhances safety in the workplace.«

Dr. Arndt Selbach | Site Manager, Wesseling, Germany

Health protection and promotion

Global management of health protection and promotion at Evonik takes a long-term, holistic approach, covering employees, the working situation, and the general working environment. Our approach to health protection and promotion includes high-quality medical care as required, applying ergonomic and health-related measures to structure working conditions, and a functioning emergency management system at plant level.

HIV and Aids have devastating effects on individuals and communities. South Africa alone records about 950 Aids-related deaths daily. Therefore, it is crucial to talk about the dangers and break the stigma surrounding the topic. To contribute to this common goal, Evonik Peroxide Africa held an interactive awareness session and offered voluntary testing for its staff along with pre- and post-counselling. We have received a lot of positive feedback.«

Surie Govender | ESHQ Manager, South Africa

We offer our employees a range of voluntary measures to foster their health. These are bundled in the group-wide Well@Work initiative. In this way, we support a healthy lifestyle. A family friendly human resources policy that takes account of different phases in employees’ lives and supports a good work-life balance is important to Evonik. Appropriate offerings are designed to counter a poor work-life balance and the increase in mental health and stress-related illness.

The Evonik Global Health Program sets out the main goals of our occupational health strategy, together with data and facts. We use this as the basis for refining our strategy and adapting it to the latest developments. The main challenges identified for the period 2020 through 2025 are the aging workforce, the global increase in mental health problems, and changes in the working world due to digitalization and Work 4.0. On this basis, priorities have been defined for our occupational health activities.

Occupational health performance index

This index shows the extent to which internal requirements have been implemented and goals achieved. It enables us to measure progress in the area of occupational health and drive forward targeted improvements. The index is calculated from two parameters from each of the following areas: occupational medicine, health promotion, and emergency medical management. Both the quality and the scope of the measures are taken into account. The index is calculated annually. In the reporting period, it covered 109 sites and 92 percent of Evonik employees. We have defined a target of ≥ 5.0 for the occupational health performance index. In 2023, the index was 5.5 (maximum: 6.0).

Transportation safety and logistics

Our aim is to minimize risk at all stages in the shipping process— from loading right through transportation to unloading. We take special care when shipping dangerous goods. Moreover, our safety standards for especially dangerous products and raw materials go beyond the regulations for such substances.

Development of a reusable strap system

We launched a project to develop a reusable strap system for containers in collaboration with Cordstrap, a company that specializes in the manufacture and development of systems to secure loads. In the past, the straps used to secure transportation containers were not reusable. This project focuses on the complete reusability of all materials, in other words, the steel components as well as the strap itself.

Alternative fuels

There are regular shuttle services between our German production facilities in Wesseling, Marl, and Witten and a distribution warehouse in Belgium. Intermodal options for defossilation of road transportation are not available for the short distances involved. Evonik partnered with a leading global energy company to provide its haulage providers with the alternative fuels HVO100 and bio-LNG. In this way, we were able to reduce CO2 emissions from these road transportation trips by about 80-90 percent and NOx emissions by more than 90 percent.