Employee health and safety management encompasses occupational safety, industrial hygiene, and occupational health management. Health and safety is managed in line with Solvay’s Responsible Care Policy requirements.

Note: Contractors are included in occupational safety statistics.
* Medical Treatment Accident Rate (MTAR): number of work accidents leading to medical treatment other than first aid per million working hours.
** Lost Time Accident Rate (LTAR): number of work accidents with lost time (away from work) of more than one day per million working hours.

Definitions

Occupational health includes all the preventive actions to protect and promote physical and psychological health at work, both collectively and for each individual employee.

Industrial hygiene management encompasses the assessment, monitoring, and management of workers’ potential exposures to ergonomic, chemical, and physical hazards.

Occupational safety is about preventing work-related injuries. Accidents were mostly linked to falls at the same level, human energy (pushing/pulling/striking an object), and exposure while opening a line or system.

Management approach

Occupational health

Occupational health activities at Solvay are managed through:

• performing risk-based medical surveillance,
• improving and adapting working conditions, and,
• promoting health.

The main occupational health key indicators are:

1. Occupational diseases (incidence rate and causes of disease): to define preventive and corrective actions;
2. Advanced risk-based medical surveillance rate: to assess that the medical surveillance is effective;
3. Human biomonitoring indicators: to assess chemical exposures (where applicable) and suggest preventive actions;
4. Stress / Well-being at work indicators: to identify main causal factors and launch action plans at the Site and Group levels.

Employee engagement and well being

Industrial hygiene

The systematic assessment and management of workers’ potential exposures to ergonomic, chemical and physical hazards are key to Solvay’s approach to protecting health. Global industrial hygiene procedures define minimum requirements for Solvay’s industrial hygiene risk assessments and management strategies including hierarchy of controls. The Industrial hygiene program encompasses:

• Comprehensive chemicals inventories established and reviewed at the site level, with screening and priority ranking of substances with potential health impacts;
• Solvay Acceptable Exposure Limits (SAELs) developed internally for insufficient or outdated established Occupational Exposure Limits (OELs);
• Occupational Exposure Banding (OEB) when no established Occupational Exposure Limit (OEL) exists or there is limited toxicological data. Solvay’s OEB approach provides a simple, quick, and easy-to-understand hazard ranking;
• Roll-out of a new global tool, SOCRATES to
• give widespread, easy access to IH methods, tools and databases,
• consistently perform and document IH risk assessments,
• enhance traceability of an individual’s potential exposures throughout their working life;
• Established key performance indicators to identify and track completion of site chemical and noise risk assessments.

Occupational safety

Several courses of action are being pursued to strengthen the Group’s Safety Culture and prevent accidents:

• Consolidation of the application of Solvay’s Life Saving Rules in all sites;
• Sharing of good practices and lessons drawn from accidents and near misses;
• Involvement of personnel in improvement actions and achievement of individual safety objectives;
• Promotion of the creating safety approach, which relies on a safety leadership style where managers act as mentors and demonstrate genuine care for all, with more focus on how we do things right.

Indicators and objectives

Occupational safety indicators

Shifting from a mindset of preventing accidents to creating safety and creating a culture of caring has made a positive impact on Solvay’s safety performance. Since embarking on this approach, more people have returned home unharmed year after year. In addition, our focus on creating a shared understanding of the risks and the mitigation measures for life critical activities, through our Solvay Life Saving Rules (SLSR), has contributed to a reduction in the number of fatalities in recent years. The number of Lost Time Accidents (LTA) remained stable compared to 2018. However, the number of LTAs associated with a medical treatment accident (MTA) decreased by 10% from 2018 to 2019. Note: In some cases, when a person is involved in an accident, they are prescribed time off by a medical professional even though the individual did not require any medical treatment. When this occurs, these incidents are classified as LTAs but not MTAs.

40% of the injuries that occurred involved hands or fingers. In 2018, Solvay focused on actions to prevent such injuries by sharing best practices and raising awareness through training. As a result, the number of such injuries was 20% lower in 2018 than in the previous two years.

Health indicators

This incidence rate concerns Solvay workers (active, retired or having left the company) and takes into account all the recognized occupational diseases (not only the short/mid latency ones which were reported in the previous years). To obtain the OSHA’s OIFR, which is expressed per 200,000 hours worked, the figures must be divided by a factor of 5.

The OIFR increased in 2019 due to more asbestos-related benign diseases recognized in France and more musculoskeletal and skin diseases recognized in the US.

The number of recordable occupational illnesses increased in 2019 due to more asbestos-related diseases and cancers notified in France, and more musculoskeletal and skin diseases notified in EMEA and in the United States.

Advanced risk-based medical surveillance

A site is considered as performing advanced risk-based medical surveillance if ALL the following criteria are fulfilled:

• the chemical risk assessment completion rate is at least 30%;
• the site regularly communicates non-negligible risks to the Medical Service provider;
• at least 70% of the employees scheduled for risk-related medical surveillance during the year completed their assessment.

Human biomonitoring of exposure

35 sites are currently performing human biomonitoring of exposure (HBM), for 32 different chemicals (substances/group of substances).

Human biomonitoring of exposure involves measuring the concentration of a substance or its metabolites in human fluids (such as urine or blood). Human biomonitoring of exposure can be used to assess exposure to specific chemicals. Unlike monitoring that measures the atmospheric presence of certain contaminants in work spaces, human biomonitoring of exposure detects what has really been absorbed by the human body via all exposure pathways (inhalation, skin penetration, etc.) and under different working conditions (physical effort, etc.). Human biomonitoring of exposure helps to verify whether protective measures are effective. It is particularly useful for substances that penetrate the skin, have a systemic effect, or accumulate in the body.

For sites which had results above the biological limit values, action plans were put in place to reduce the exposure levels.

2019 Key achievements

Occupational health

• Consolidation of Occupational Health network: 14 Country/Regional Medical Referents support Sites, GBUs, and local medical teams in Occupational Health and co-build Group recommendations;
• Global world-wide training of Sites (Medical teams, HSE, HR, Site Managers) on “Group requirements in Occupational Health” that will allow each Site to identify gaps and define a corrective action plan for full compliance by the end of 2020;
• Well-being at work (see specific chapter for more details): deployment of a worldwide burn-out observatory, training for managers, raising employee awareness by e-learning;
• The Travel Policy has been updated to include an obligation to undergo a pre-travel medical check for destinations classified as having a high sanitary risk. Employees traveling to risky destinations are informed as soon as they book a flight. This represents concrete progress and will ensure better prevention and protection of employees travelling for business reasons.

Occupational safety

Progress has been made on the “Creating Safety” journey, an innovative approach introduced in 2017 at the top management level. Twenty-five (25) sites have now carried out “Safety Climate” or similar assessments to understand the status of their safety culture. Sites have been training employees and contractors on risk awareness and safety leadership.

Several Global Business Unit and Function leadership teams have held training sessions with several recognized consultants. These types of sessions help create a common vision for what the company wants to achieve in terms of creating safety, as opposed to merely striving to prevent accidents.

Industrial hygiene

More than 75 percent of Solvay’s sites are now using SOCRATES, the new tool to manage industrial hygiene across the Group. The tool efficiently supports exposure assessment and sets clear priorities for risk management. Together with improved exposure documentation, SOCRATES will support industrial hygiene follow-up and advanced individualized medical surveillance. GBUs are to fully implement SOCRATES at all manufacturing and R&I sites by the end of 2021.

The development of SOCRATES was a collaborative effort with participation from the users. Today SOCRATES enables a site to easily and consistently perform and document risk assessments for all personnel who are potentially exposed to industrial hygiene agents such as chemicals, noise, ergonomics, and vibrations. Notifications from the system can inform people in charge about risk control measures. A useful feature allows shop-floor workers or researchers to access the tool and contribute to assessments of their own workplace.

SOCRATES makes it easier to trace an individual’s exposure to hazardous agents throughout their entire working life. It also supports the advanced medical monitoring of employees as promoted by the Group. Indeed, surveillance by medical teams is optimal if based on good knowledge and documentation of working conditions, especially regarding exposure to chemicals.