Safety

BOCs social and environmental stewardship

BOC manufactures and distributes some products that are potentially hazardous, being stored at very low temperature or under pressure, with some exhibiting toxic or flammable properties. BOC is committed to practising and communicating safe operations around the world as part of its commitment to robust product stewardship. It is as important for the Group to transmit safe working methodologies to customers and suppliers as it is to have clear, entrenched and measurable performance standards practised by all BOC plants, depots and distributors, regardless of plant, product or service. Each business unit in each region has a safety function, which is aligned with the unit’s business activities and connected to the Group’s other safety functions by a peer group network. This ensures that global best practice and the business’ functional requirements are always at the forefront.

Controlling process-related risks is of the utmost importance. Any incidents that do occur are thoroughly investigated and the lessons learned applied throughout the organisation to minimise the likelihood of recurrence. Safety lessons are shared throughout the gases industry and BOC continues to participate fully in the development and application of industry-wide codes. BOC has instigated a five-year plan to halve the Group’s accident rate. A five-year strategy has been developed to enable these overall goals to be achieved and this strategy has been cascaded to regional businesses for local input. The main items underpinning the strategy are implementing, communicating, measuring and reporting best practice as well as training, competence and behavioural management systems.

Training and competence of BOC employees is continually improving as the Group’s IMSS package is rolled out globally, ensuring best practice is applied within all businesses.

As part of its five-year strategy, BOC is implementing a behavioural safety programme to improve significantly safety performance across the organisation. This programme will look at subjects such as management leadership in safety and the safety behaviour of individuals. Significant improvements were recorded across all of the Group’s key safety performance indicators with good results in the reduction of total recordable incidents and passenger car accidents.

As in every year, BOC takes steps to prevent and address the underlying causes of serious accidents as well as to ensure employee security in the workplace. The Group uses four principal indicators to provide a consistent measure of its workplace and vehicle safety performance.

These are:

• Lost Workday Case Rate (LWCR) per 200,000 hours. This includes all accidents resulting in the loss of one complete day of work, according to best international practice. Many companies only report cases resulting in three or more lost workdays as deemed reportable under RIDDOR regulations.
• Total Recordable Case Rate (TRCR) per 200,000 hours. This includes all LWCs and medical treatment cases.
• Passenger Car Avoidable Accident Rate (PCAAR) per million miles.
• Truck Avoidable Accident Rate (TAAR) per million miles.