Safety and health

Management approach

In line with our goal of zero harm in the workplace we take positive and proactive steps to improve our safety and health performance. As we operate in dangerous work environments, hazards are ever-present and must be controlled. Improvements in leadership, people involvement, plant practices and infrastructure have led to recent reductions in injuries and incidents but we recognise that more still needs to be done.

We also recognise that aligned and consistent safety training is necessary to improve our performance by ensuring that everyone who works for Mondi has the necessary safety awareness and skills training to recognise and avoid risk, especially fatal risk.

Our Group has a single safety philosophy: all incidents are preventable if we learn from experience, and our goal is zero harm. Our visible management commitment is a critical part of our commitment to zero harm in the workplace; it is an explicit acknowledgement that safety is a business and personal value. Visible leadership demonstrates that we care about people and take a proactive approach to building trust across the Group.

Our approach to safety and health management is underpinned by our desire to move towards an interdependent culture where responsibility for safety and health is a shared one. While ultimate responsibility for safety and health lies in the hands of line management, all employees and contractors are required to act in a safe way as a condition of employment. Training, auditing and correcting deficiencies immediately are intrinsic to a culture of safety. For Mondi, there are no acceptable excuses for at-risk behaviour.

Mondi’s policies, standards and requirements on safety and occupational health are reviewed annually to take into account learning from incidents that have occurred, both internally and externally, and from other sources such as codes of practice and other recognised safe practice developments. A revision of our Safety and Health Performance Requirements was undertaken in October 2010.

A safety and health network consisting of senior safety and health professionals across the Group, supports line management in the approach that all businesses, divisions, business units and operations must have safety improvement plans which drive continuous performance improvement and are aligned with the Group's systematic and standardised approach to safety management. This risk-based approach underpins all our safety and health programmes as it details the Group's safety policy, standards and performance requirements.

To assess the effectiveness of the management controls in place to reduce safety risks, the members of the network conduct audits on safety priorities and indicators. One of our key safety principles is 'no repeats'. It is only through understanding the causes of what happened and by identifying and acting upon preventative actions that we can avert similar incidents. The outcomes of incident investigations, together with our understanding of the causes of high-potential incidents, are used to identify the essential learning and actions across Mondi that are needed to avoid recurrence. The safety and health network has a role to guide managers on how to apply consistent and sustainable risk-control measures. Quarterly network meetings are hosted by different operations, and include a site visit followed by a management feedback session. This ensures that the host operation benefits from the visit and ensures that safe practice is shared.

An integral part of our systematic approach, the Nine Safety Rules to Live By, are applied across the Group and deal with the following:

Rule 1: Applying permits-to-work, controlling modifications and managing change

Rule 2: Operating mobile equipment

Rule 3: Entering confined spaces

Rule 4: Working at heights

Rule 5: Making energy and machinery isolation

Rule 6: Working on rotating and moving machinery

Rule 7: Conducting mechanical lifting and materials handling

Rule 8: Handling chemicals and controlling hazardous substances

Rule 9: Working in the forests

These are supported by a set of nine common learning modules, comprising employee and contractor training that is aligned with the nine safety rules, which are embedded into our safety management system. Our safety leadership training for managers, safety skills training for supervisors, and employee/contractor learning modules encourage the safe practices necessary to achieve our goal of zero harm in the workplace, and ensure that both employees and contractors have the same level of safety understanding and awareness, and understand that they are expected to apply these uniformly across Mondi. The common safety learning modules in particular address competency issues that have been raised, learning from other industry standards and recognise frequent incidents where competence, or the lack thereof, is often a factor.

We use safety indicators to provide clear safety objectives for all our operations. In our drive for continuous improvement, we have moved from measuring only lagging indicators (such as LTIFR) to focussing on current and lead indicators, including compliance audits and behavioural observations; critical task training or action close-outs in which operations are required to track the close-out of all action items developed from incident investigations, critical task audits, serious and significant close calls and dangerous occurrences.

Safety is overseen at a Group level. The Group sustainable development policy is supported by seven individual sector policies, one of which covers safety and occupational health. In addition, the Group’s SDMS provides a mechanism by which Mondi ensures strong corporate governance in issues such as employee and contractor safety, occupational health, process and equipment safety, training auditing and many more safety- and health-related topics. See the Governance of sustainability section for further information.

Operation managers, contractor managers and safety professionals conduct thorough investigations of each and every incident that occurs and apply what we have learnt from these investigations. Once these investigations have been completed, we share our findings and action plans across the Group by issuing actions, safety alerts and incident notices.

Two of the main areas of risk in respect of safety are the 'operation of mobile plant and equipment' and 'moving and rotating machinery'. As a result, these have been the main focus areas of audits in 2010, and of training and ongoing hazard awareness.

Safety communications sessions are conducted at all operations involving employees and contractors, the frequency of which varies from location to location. During these sessions employees and contractors are encouraged to raise their concerns regarding safety and health issues. Operations also conduct their statutory safety committee meetings with management and employees represented. The frequency of these sessions varies due to local legislation and the number of employees employed at an operation.

Occupational health will receive additional attention in 2011. The systems at operations vary due to the actual occupational health stressors present. Most operations have recognisable noise levels and therefore programmes are in place to measure actual noise levels, demarcate and place warning signs at all noisy zones and provide suitable hearing protection devices to protect employees, contractors and visitors from noise exposure, thereby preventing possible noise-induced hearing loss. All persons working in noisy zones are required to attend regular medical examinations to monitor their hearing and to identify early signs of noise-induced hearing loss. Please see our health statistics.

Operations are encouraged to run health days for employees. Various medical practitioners as well as health care providers are invited to participate. There is a specific focus on noise-induced hearing loss, and the correct use of personal protective equipment. In addition, employees can monitor their personal health by undergoing eye, blood and sugar level tests, etc.

Towards zero harm

Our long-term goal is to have zero work-related fatalities among employees and contractors.

It is with great regret that we report two fatalities during the year, both in South Africa – one involving a contractor working in the forests and the other an employee at the Merebank mill.

The contractor was fatally injured when he was hit by a falling tree in a secluded area. Subsequently, we have included additional arrangements for keep-safe distances under all circumstances when manual felling work commences. In December 2010, a mill employee lost his life when he entered a restricted area without authorisation and was trapped by a chain conveyor. We have non-negotiable rules concerned with the safety of our employees and contractors and these include machine isolation (lock-tag-test-try) practices. We are currently reinforcing this behaviour across the Group.

The Group's number of lost-time injuries decreased by over 60% compared with 2005 (70% when excluding the performance of the acquisitions).

The Group's lost-time injury frequency rate has been reduced by over 50% compared with 2005 (60% when excluding the performance of the acquisitions).

The Group's total recordable case frequency rate has remained fairly stable in spite of the incorporation of the new acquisition's performance.

In 2010, there were a number of areas of activity aimed at achieving our goal of zero harm.

Improving contractor safety

Contractor fatalities remain an area of concern to us. We have a specific focus on contractor safety management, providing the necessary tool for operations to manage contractors and involve them in our overall safety and safety-related programmes. Contractor safety management includes a six-step process for contract manager appointment, contract appraisal and contractor selection, safety plans and documentation, contractor orientation and induction, contractor supervision and monitoring, and performance review and preferred status assignment. Contractor performance has improved.

During 2010 additional focus was placed on annual maintenance outages as well as large projects. Assistance was provided by the professional safety managers from across the Group, as well as line managers to the contractors in ensuring that Mondi standards were maintained while the work was being conducted. Employees were seconded from various operations to assist during these high-risk periods. In addition, line personnel at some operations trained received additional safety training to enable them to act as safety marshals during the annual outage periods and improving contractor induction programmes – see the case study: Safety marshals ensure lost-time injury-free shut-down at UFP operations in 2010. This additional focus, guidance and coaching resulted in all the material sites completing their annual maintenance outage periods without a single lost-time injury.

Safety marshals ensure lost-time injury-free shut down at UFP operations in 2010 A significant safety achievement of the E&I uncoated fine paper (UFP) and Containerboard operations in 2010 was the completion of the annual shut downs at the Syktyvkar mill in Russia, Mondi SCP in Slovakia, Świecie in Poland and the Neusiedler mill in Austria, without any lost-time injuries. These large-scale shut downs pose serious safety risks as they involve hundreds of extra contractors on site at one time, initially unfamiliar with the plant and its safety procedures. But through collaboration, extra safety marshals and visible leadership, these mills managed to achieve 650,000 injury-free hours during these outages and uphold our zero harm objective. See the full case study.

Black liquor recovery boiler group

Black liquor recovery boiler plant operations' primary purpose is to recycle chemicals required in the alkaline pulp manufacturing (kraft) process. This is a by-product of chemical pulping that undergoes thermal oxidation of its combustible organic materials in the presence of evaporating water and melting inorganic chemicals. Black liqour particles react at the lower furnace at temperatures between 900°C and 1,300°C and, as such, water or low-solids containing black liquor must be prevented from entering the furnace of the recovery boiler.

Asset integrity is related to the prevention of major incidents and this is an outcome of good design, construction and operating practices. Among other hazards, our emphasis is on preventing unplanned entry of water or low solid black liquor into the hot furnace that may result in a major incident.

We have developed a black liquor recovery boiler integrity manual that provides a systematic approach to boiler asset integrity management within which all hazards and the risks they pose can be identified, assessed and managed in a way that good industry practice techniques (such as the recommendations made by the United States Black Liquor Recovery Boiler Advisory Committee) are applied.

We understand that the good safety performance of an asset does not guarantee major incident prevention, however this requires the application of engineering standards, well-managed practices and individual competencies that are necessary to ensure the selected barriers (for the hazard to materialise as a loss) remain effective.

The black liquor recovery boiler working group, comprising recovery boiler managers and engineers, was set up in 2005 to develop a manual for the safe operation of recovery boilers. Following self-assessments conducted in 2008, an assurance programme is being developed that covers all boilers. Audits were conducted at Dynäs (Sweden) and at Richards Bay (South Africa) in 2009, and in 2010 audits were conducted in the Štětí (Czech Republic), Dynäs (Sweden) and the Stabolijski (Bulgaria) operations.

Other key initiatives during the year are discussed below.

• Aligning risk control measures across the Group. Our SDMS summarises our management approach towards serious and significant safety risks within the Group. It includes 34 safety-related mandatory performance requirements to support the implementation of zero harm, which guides managers on how to apply consistent and sustainable risk-control measures. All operations conducted self-assessments against these requirements in 2008 and 2009, and developed action plans to close the gap in areas of non-conformance. Each operation monitors its own action plan to ensure continuous improvement towards compliance.
• Our Annual Safety Calendar. This calendar, started in 2009, outlines the consistent application of our safety and health programme across the Group and ensures an ongoing awareness of safety and health matters. A new topic is addressed every two months. Material was developed centrally and distributed to all operations, including training slides, a supervisor’s training guide and sets of posters which are available online in seven languages. Operations were required to adapt the material to site-specific requirements, including local translation, site-specific rules and procedures, examples and photographs. In 2010, we addressed selected topics focusing on the main risks which are common to all operations, including working at heights, lifting and materials handling and permits to work.
• Making a Difference Day 2010. We believe that visibly committed management is a critical component of our commitment to zero harm in the workplace, and that this demonstrates an explicit acknowledgement that safety is a business and personal value. An initiative to demonstrate our care for people, the environment and the communities in which we live and work was held for the first time in 2010, with 1 June dedicated to safety, health, environment and community engagement across the Group. All operations in our E&I Divison were asked to participate in an attempt to internalise zero harm in the workplace. Operations were creative and undertook a number of activities, showing visible management commitment through meetings, initiatives and walkabouts; safety discussions on selected topics; practical exercises (such as the use of seatbelts in cars, the effects of alcohol); health examinations for employees and contractors; individual and team pledges to take action on topics of safety and environment; safe practice in the use of firefighting equipment or personal protective equipment; and inviting neighbours and other stakeholders to open days. See the case study: Making a difference: Mondi's employee engagement initiative.
• Focus topics. To prevent repeat incidents, two topics were selected as focus areas in 2008 and 2009. These were workplace transportation (operating and mobile equipment), and moving and rotating machinery. Specialist audits were conducted at all operations and actions have been included in the safety improvement plans. The progress will be monitored through to completion in 2011.
• Phepha Programme. Our South African forestry operations embarked on a safety communication programme some years ago, which included the use of industrial theatre and a series of animated safety videos. This was particularly important given the high incidence of lost-time injuries as well as fatal incidents experienced by the logging operations. There has since been a quantum improvement in the safety performance of the logging operations and the programme has stimulated employee involvement in Group safety efforts. The programme uses Phepha, an animated character, which has been used in all the training material and videos in a local language, and to whom employees can relate.
• Learning from our incidents.To ensure that the details of any safety, health and environmental incident are shared with all operations, as part of our drive to prevent repeat incidents, we introduced a 24-hour initial notification document. Other Group communication around an injury, incident and accident includes: a Management summary report, which must be submitted within two weeks of the incident and provides details of the learnings and contributing factors; an Incident notice which provides details in a slide presentation format for communication purposes across Mondi; and Safe alerts and Practice notes, which are developed for selected types of incidents to address recurring matters. The process is highly effective, ensuring a common understanding of the factors contributing to incidents, as well as learning from each incident, and enabling all other operations to share the information with their own employees and to develop specific action plans, where relevant.
• Safety-related systems of work. This was developed for converting operations in recent years, which take into account the hazards, risks and control systems that need to be in place for an injury-free performance, were implemented in 2010 and audited for procedural compliance at year-end.

Selected data on this page has been subject to external assurance by ERM. See the Assurance report.

Last change: 17.03.2011