Safety performance sustainability

This work was performed under EPA s Chemical Safety for Sustainability Research Program (CSS). The authors wish to acknowledge the ToxCast and Virtual Embryo project teams for their helpful insight. 

Corporate communicators responsible for communicating the company s safety performance within the company and to the public Industry trade groups that want to promote the safety of the industries they represent and show progress towards sustainable process safety improvement ... 

Any organization that wishes to improve and sustain process safety performance must clearly establish its performance goals and objectives. Efforts to sustain and improve process safety performance will require a means to measure and evaluate that performance. Collecting performance information enables an organization to achieve their desired goals and objectives by helping to ... 

As described in Chapter 8, companies and industry associations are increasingly sharing their performance metrics with the public through corporate performance or sustainability reports that include information on many regulatory and voluntary areas including environmental releases, carbon footprints as well as safety performance. 

Visibly supporting a continuous improvement culture that benefits everyone is an effective strategy to sustain process safety performance. Improvement efforts are often cast as a program with a definite beginning and presumptive end point. Driving to zero process safety incidents will require a sustained effort with evolving focus over the life of the process operations. 

Process safety—and the metrics to identify and track it—can be incorporated into a company s overall sustainability program. Adoption of improved process safety leading and lagging indicators that document improving process safety performance will be important in maintaining the organization s license to operate broadly as well as in a specific location. 

There is growing interest by investors to invest in firms and funds that reflect the investors own social values. These funds are tending to focus on the more immediate sustainability factors such as carbon footprint, energy efficiency, and environmental performance. As analysts become more familiar with process safety metrics— and those metrics are demonstrated to be useful predictors of a company s future safety performance—it is reasonable that a similar value could be placed on firms that are demonstrating their commitment to process safety as a separate factor or process safety as an element of other social values. Such demonstrated commitment to safety performance should also provide additional information, above and beyond financial information, on which the analyst can assess the overall risk of a firm or facility. 

The field of solid-phase synthesis instrumentation is continually advancing. Improvements in synthesis reagents, reaction monitoring, and instrument hardware and software will extend the limits of the instrumentation. As synthesizer capabilities improve, there is the potential that more and more control will be taken from the user until the instrument becomes a black box. It is important, however, to maintain an understanding of the principles of instrument operation and the chemistry that is being performed. The instrument is secondary to the chemistry but is an essential tool to help carry out the synthesis efficiently. The best instrument cannot improve ineffective chemistry and, conversely, a poorly designed instrument can compromise a very efficient chemical process. As long as the basic principles of reaction kinetics, fluid mechanics, and instrument safety are sustained, a solid-phase synthesizer can be used to its maximum potential and benefits. 

Safety Performance Data [EB/OL] [20080-11-1] http // www.alcoa.com/global/en/about dcoa/sustainability/ health safe perform.asp. 

We now understand clearly that one of the most important contributors to sustained— and improved—safety performance is leadership and the impact that leaders make by being available (visible and felt) in the workplace. Being accessible to employees while they are carrying out their day-to-day duties can make a very positive impact on the way employees view their leaders and can positively influence their behavior and performance. (Fourie, 2012)... 

Evaluation. The design options are checked with respect to their performance. Taking the wide range of criteria in the safety, health, onomics, enviromnent and t echnology (SHEET) aspects speciflc choices are made for economic performance, sustainability and technology. With respect to economics, we calculate the capital and operational costs of a process for its time horizon. We use exergy efficiency as a sustainability metric, while a systems response time is used to define the responsiveness of the process. 

An MoD guide to in-service safety management (MoD 2007b) covers service aspects of safety concerned with ensuring that the in-service arrangements for sustaining the Safety performance of equipment introduced to service, are recognised, put in place and operated , but makes little reference to software. 

ProAct Safety, an international safety consulting firm, announced its participation in several 2012 local and national safety and industry conferences with presentations on various safety performance and improvement topics. In addition to ProAct Safety s 2012 public workshops, these conference sessions will convey vital information about successful and sustainable safety processes. For more information about any of these events or ProAct Safety s safety improvement programs, visit www.proactsafety.com/events/event-schedule or call 800-395-1347. 

There is a lack of willingness to make a sustained commitment over several years. Behaviour modification processes are seen as a quick fix to boost safety performance. 

Ethan, G., Little, D. (July 2011). Risk—assessing and mitigating to deliver sustainable safety performance. Professional Safety. 

FIGURE 22.9 Description of the five Sustainable Safety guiding principles. (Adapted from Wegman, F. et al. 2008. SUNflowerNext Towards a composite road safety performance index. SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research, Leidschendam, the Netherlands.)... 

The proposed method allows the continuous monitoring of OHS conditions in workplaces associated to workers safety performance. The combination of a checklist of dendritics and a control chart seems to be an adequate and sustainable approach for this purpose. On the one hand, the checklist, developed by mean of a Preliminary Hazard Analysis, includes all the hazardous conditions of the company and in particular all the at-risk behaviours. On the other hand, the control chart allows identifying all the hazardous conditions that are critical for the employees. 

When the first edition of this book was written in 1993, data were not available on the long-term success of the behavioral approach. The two case studies that follow show that the process can be long lasting and help support a sustained level of safety performance for long periods of time. 

Training is required in order to sustain safety knowledge, and includes establishing procedures and safety performance standards for each job... 

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