Responsible Care Management System

Responsible Care Management System

• Global directives and standards for safety, security, health and environmental protection
• Regular audits to monitor performance and progress

BASF’s Responsible Care Management System comprises the global directives, standards and procedures for safety, security, health and environmental protection for the various stations along our value chain. Our regulations cover the transportation of raw materials, activities at our sites and warehouses, and distribution of our products as well as our customers’ application of the products. Specifications for implementing these measures are laid out in binding directives that are introduced in consultation with employee representatives. These describe the relevant responsibilities, requirements and assessment methods. Our policies and requirements are constantly updated. We also maintain a dialog with government institutions, associations and other international organizations.

We set ourselves ambitious goals for safety and security, and health and environmental protection. We regularly conduct audits to monitor our performance and progress. We assess the potential risks and weak points of all our activities – from research to production and logistics – and the effects of these on the safety and security of our employees, the environment or our surroundings. In our databases, we document accidents, near misses and safety-related incidents at our sites as well as along our transportation routes to learn from these; appropriate measures are derived according to specific cause analyses.

Audits

• 109 safety, security, health and environmental protection audits performed at 83 sites

Regular audits help ensure that standards are met for safety, security, health and environmental protection. We conduct audits at BASF sites and at companies in which BASF is a majority shareholder. Sites and companies acquired as part of acquisitions are audited in a timely manner to bring these into line with our standards and directives. We have defined our regulations for Responsible Care audits in a global Group requirement. During our audits, we create a safety and environmental profile that shows if we are properly addressing the existing hazard potential. If this is not the case, we agree on measures and conduct follow-up audits on their implementation.

Our internal audit system complies with the standards for external auditing procedures ISO 19011 and OHSAS 18001. Worldwide, 178 BASF production sites are certified in accordance with ISO 14001 (2016: 155).

In the BASF Group in 2017, 109 environmental and safety audits were conducted at 83 sites. The focus was on auditing sites based on the level of risk. For production plants with a medium and high hazard potential, we conducted an additional 63 short-notice audits at 47 sites. We audited 13 sites with respect to occupational medicine and health protection in 2017. The number of these audits declined due to the risk-based approach to site selection. In addition, 31 health performance control visits were conducted at sites with low to medium health risks.