Safety

Safety, as one of Glencore’s Values, drives how we do business, and the safety of our workforce always comes first. Our business inherently exposes some of our workers to safety risks .   

We are committed to protecting our workforce by creating safe workplaces, where we continually work towards improving safety performance through controls that eliminate and mitigate residual risks. We maintain a proactive safety culture, led by strong and visible leadership, and implement management systems with the appropriate controls in place for the management of our safety risks.

We focus on increasing our workforce’s capability to work safely and empower them to stop work when it is not safe. We require an effective health and safety management system at each industrial asset for the management of safety risks, designed to ensure the integrity of plant and equipment, structures, processes and protective systems, as well as the monitoring and review of critical controls.

SafeWork is our approach to eliminating fatalities. SafeWork has a set of minimum expectations and mandatory fatal hazard protocols (FHPs), life-saving behaviours and safety tools, which our industrial assets must implement. We believe consistent application of SafeWork through strong, visible leadership drives a culture of safe operating discipline and will get our people home safe. 

Our industrial assets report high-potential risk incidents (HPRIs) as part of our strategy to reduce repeat incidents and, as such, we do not target a reduction in this metric. We have integrated the concept of zero-energy HPRIs into our monthly HSEC&HR performance reporting. A zero-energy event refers to the identification of unsafe actions or conditions prior to an actual incident taking place. For example, a worker failing to wear appropriate fall protection equipment while working at height, but who did not fall, would be recorded as a zero-energy HPRI. We are strengthening our understanding of zero-energy HPRIs to drive their reporting, which in turn should support an improvement in safety culture and drive improved safety performance. We share learnings from HPRIs across our industrial assets. 

Our Contractors and Suppliers HSEC&HR Management Standard sets out the mandatory requirements for our industrial assets’ management of contractors and suppliers with respect to our health, safety, environment, social performance and human rights (HSEC&HR) risks and compliance against our HSEC&HR requirements. Our commitment to improve our safety performance was a key driver in the development and implementation of the standard. The standard requires all our industrial commodity departments to conduct a risk assessment to identify, assess and define controls for the management of HSEC&HR risks, opportunities and impacts arising from the use of contractors and suppliers and their work. The implementation of the standard is initially focused on safety, with various initiatives to improve leaders’ capability to manage contractors, help prevent safety-related incidents and share learnings from HPRI investigations.