Health & Safety
ICL complies with strict occupational safety and health standards, as well as invests extensive resources in safety training, to prevent accidents and ensure the health and safety of our employees, of visitors and contractors visiting our sites and of our product supply chain. ICL is continuing to enhance its procedures and measures in an attempt to reach its goal of zero accidents. \
ICL is aggressively pursuing excellence in safety performance and a zero accidental goal. To achieve this, ICL continually strives to improve its safety measures and stress excellence in safety at all of its sites.
Industrial production, in general, and the chemicals industry, in particular, require taking special precautionary measures to maintain a safe and healthy work environment. Some of our products, raw materials and production processes represent a high risk to anyone who deviates from required professional safety standards or from the mandatory means of safety.
Total Work Accidents (company & contractors)
Ensuring that our operations, products and distribution systems are safe and secure for employees and our site contractors as well as and guests, distributors, and the communities in which our facilities are located, is part of our ‘Environment, Safety, Health and Security’ policy.
We have adopted occupational health and safety management system beyond the regulatory compliance in 89% of our production sites These safety management systems are either OHSAS 18001 certified or equivalent management system. These sites include approx. 78% of our employees (based on data used in indicator 102-8). Sites that do not have industrial production process, such as office buildings, do not have safety management systems beyond what is required by law. That includes approx. 19% of our employees.
Comparative accident figures
| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rate of work accidents (IR Rate) | 1 | 0.8 | 0.8 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.8 |
| Rate of lost workdays (SI Rate) | 28.4 | 21.7 | 22.9 | 23.1 | 23 | 25.2 |
A nonfatal work accident is defined by causing at least one-day of absence following the event. During 2017, company employees total working hours were approximately 22 million. Calculations of both IR and SI rates are being done based on a 200,000 factor (multiplied by total company employee lost workday cases and absent days, respectively). Due to data availability constraints, Both IR and SI rates are for company employees only. However, contractors safety performance is tracked and monitored regularly for all our sites. We are working with our contractors to increase their involvement in safety management (read more about it here).
Despite our continued efforts to reduce work accidents at our sites, in 2017 a fatal work accident occurred involving a contract worker who fell from a high roof at ICL Iberia, Totana. The accident investigation results found that the worker was employed by a certified roof expert company, and that pre-work risk assessment was conducted and approved by a local legislation inspector. Unfortunately, the accident happened at the end of the workday, when the worker returned to the repaired roof, and the protective equipment (harness and retractable lifeline) was not properly anchored. Following the incident, proactive guidance, training and compliance checks were implemented in order to emphasize the obligation to always use safety harnesses and lifeline anchored to fixed positions when working on roofs and heights in general.
In addition, in 2017, we recorded 115 non-fatal work accidents, of which 90 involved ICL employees and 25 involved contract workers.
Safety Week
At the beginning of 2017, ICL initiated a global safety awareness event. Thousands of our employees, at our sites worldwide, from China to Germany, participated in a “Global Safety Week”. The goal of the event was to increase pro-active behavior by employees and managers to reduce and prevent safety accidents and to emphasize that safety is everyone's responsibility.
Each of our sites engaged in activities designed to increase safety in their particular production processes. Extra time was allocated for risk assessment and incident assessment, additional technical instruction was provided, and employees who were previously injured in work accidents spoke with their peers about their experience to drive home the message regarding the importance of work safety.
