Safety

In line with our Values, our first priority in the workplace is to protect the health and wellbeing of all of our people. We are committed to operating safely and believe all fatalities, occupational diseases and injuries at work are preventable.

Our SafeWork framework is risk-based, focusing on eliminating fatalities and serious injuries by identifying the hazards that can result in fatal incidents and developing life-saving behaviours and protocols to target them.

SafeWork aims to provide everyone within our business with the knowledge and tools to perform every task safely; the key message is that every individual has the authority to stop unsafe work.

Listen to Peter Freyberg talking about SafeWork

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Listen to Peter Freyberg talking about SafeWork

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Why SafeWork and how has it evolved, watch the animation

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Why SafeWork and how has it evolved, watch the animation

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Our approach

Our ambition is to prevent all fatalities, occupational diseases and injuries at work.

Mitigating risk is at the heart of our safety management approach. We seek to achieve this though our SafeWork initiative.

Our leaders, at all levels of the business, are responsible for identifying and managing risks, to create and maintain safe work environments and protect our people.

Committed to operating safely

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In South Africa, our ferroalloys business partnered with three different suppliers to develop a cutting-edge person-to-vehicle detection system - the first of its kind fitted to diesel vehicles. Read more

Implementing our safety management system

We require an effective safety management system at each asset to assure the integrity of plants, equipment, structures, processes and protective systems, as well as the monitoring and review of critical controls.

Our Board Health, Safety, Environment, Community and Human Rights (HSEC) committee oversees the Group’s safety performance. The CEO, Board HSEC committee and Group sustainability team receive notification of any fatality within 24 hours, with independent third-party assistance on site within 72 hours.

The Board HSEC committee reviews every fatal incident with the senior management of the affected commodity department and asset, and circulates relevant learnings across the Group. It also reviews the findings of investigations into high potential risk incidents (HPRIs).

The commodity department implements appropriate corrective actions to prevent re-occurrences.

Our sustainability team set targets and develops programmes to drive continual improvement in safety performance. These focus on delivering robust risk identification and assessment processes. All our performance data and targets includes contractors and employees.

Along with our industry peers, we report on our safety performance to the ICMM every year, to promote the improvement of safety performances.

KCC 360 Safety

Case study: Safety in the DRC

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KCC 360 Safety

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Case study: Safety in the DRC

Driving continuous improvement

Our assets report and share high potential risk incidents (HPRIs) every week. HPRIs are an opportunity to learn about the effectiveness of critical controls and underpin our approach of continuous learning. The emphasis on reporting and recording HPRIs has been vital to our progress in safety management; identifying trends as they arise, and taking corrective action, helps to prevent systemic issues and repeat incidents. Through utilising the knowledge gained from the analysis of HPRIs, we putt measures in place to prevent similar incidents as well as ﬁnd solutions to situations that contribute to the highest cause of HPRIs.

SafeWork: Promoting a risk-based safety culture

We believe sound risk management drives an effective safety culture. Our SafeWork initiative supports long-term sustainable change that promotes the elimination of fatalities and serious injuries.

The initiative’s aim is to provide everyone within our business with the knowledge and tools to perform every task safely; the key message is that every individual has the authority to stop unsafe work.

The SafeWork framework is risk-based. It focuses on identifying the hazards that cause serious injuries and fatalities within our operations and developing life-saving behaviours and protocols to target them.

The fundamental components of SafeWork are:

Fatal hazard protocols: specific requirements to address the most common causes of fatalities and serious injuries within the industry.
Life-saving behaviours: The behaviours intended to save lives and protect people from serious injuries. These encourage everyone to value safety, protect themselves, their colleagues and the company’s assets
Training: Supporting tools that include universal risk awareness training, virtual reality training materials on each fatal hazard and other training aids.
Empowering first-line supervisors: Empowering first-line supervisors to take responsibility for their work areas, manage technical safety aspects and promote safe behaviours.

Safety leadership is a fundamental part of our transformation plan. Employees from all levels feed back to their work teams on equipment and protocol, ensuring we mitigate and eliminate safety risks that may present themselves throughout the day. Read more on safety leadership at our Kazzinc asset in Kazakhstan.

Contractor safety management

We expect anyone on our site, including contractors, to comply with the same safety requirements as our direct employees, and to meet our safety training standards.

We have contractor management systems in place at our assets to support contractor compliance. Our contractors’ safety performance is included in the data publicly reported by Glencore.

We expect every individual – employee or contractor – to take responsibility for their own safety, and for that of their colleagues.