Our Management and Control Systems
The health and safety of our employees and contractors is our top priority, as is the quality and safety of our products. To this end, we have established comprehensive management and control systems. Our Responsible Care Management System comprises the global directives, standards and procedures for environmental protection, health and safety.
Responsible Care Management System
BASF is actively involved in the International Council of Chemical Associations’ global Responsible Care® initiative. Our Responsible Care Management System covers the environmental protection, health and safety aspects that we have identified as material. When it comes to health protection and safety, this is particularly relevant for the production at our plants, activities at our sites and warehouses, as well as distribution of our products down to our customers’ application of our products. The Environmental Protection, Health, Safety and Quality (EHSQ) unit in the Corporate Center defines Group-wide mandatory management and control systems and monitors compliance with internal requirements as well as legal regulations through audits, while the sites and Group companies implement these requirements locally. Our global network enables information and insights to be shared across the BASF Group on an ongoing basis.
Our policies and requirements are continuously updated. We also maintain dialog with government institutions, associations and international organizations for this reason. We set ourselves ambitious goals for safety and health protection. We assess the potential risks and weaknesses of all our major activities – from research and development to production and logistics – and the potential effects of these on safety, the environment and our surroundings. We use databases to record accidents, near misses and safety-related incidents at our sites as well as along our transportation routes. This documentation helps us to continuously improve. Appropriate measures are derived according to specific cause analyses.
Responsible Care audits
Regular audits help ensure that our safety, health and environmental protection standards are met. We conduct regular audits every three to six years at all BASF sites and at companies in which BASF is a majority shareholder. We take a risk-based approach here. An audit database ensures that all sites and plants worldwide are regularly audited. We have defined our regulations for Responsible Care audits in a global Corporate Requirement. The Board of Executive Directors is regularly informed about the results of the audits. Newly acquired sites and companies are generally audited for the first time after the integration phase is complete, generally within one to two years depending on complexity and number of sites. During our audits, we create a safety and environmental profile that shows if we are properly addressing the hazard potential. If this is not the case, we agree on corrective measures to be implemented within a certain time frame depending on the identified hazard potential. We monitor this in follow-up audits, among other things.
In the BASF Group in 2023, 120 environmental and safety audits were conducted at 72 sites (2022: 115 audits at 73 sites). The sites were audited based on their individual risk profile. Auditing of the sites acquired in 2020 from Solvay was interrupted due to local coronavirus restrictions in 2022 was continued and completed in the 2023 reporting year. In addition, eight sites were audited on occupational medicine and health protection (2022: 16).