Safety

Occupational health and safety

The priority throughout the Lenzing Group is keeping everyone safe and maintaining the safety measures in place. Whether working from home or adapting to new site procedures, the employees play an instrumental role in ensuring Lenzing’s business can continue to operate safely during the pandemic.

The strategy for improving health and safety and achieving the commitment to “LEAVE HOME HEALTHY, COME HOME HEALTHY”, is outlined in the “Heartbeat for Safety” roadmap and throughout 2021, steps were taken at the corporate level to continue building a strong safety culture. A key initiative was the introduction of monthly safety webinars, based on a zero accident concept, which opens up the field of safety culture and breaks it down into bite-sized components to facilitate new and critical thinking to inspire practical action. The safety webinars have directed the efforts to align safety culture concepts with the business agenda, with the involvement of contributors from senior managers and leaders throughout the group.

Within the management systems, another central development in 2021 was the transition from OHSAS 18001 to the new Health and Safety Management standard ISO 45001, which will improve processes, help monitor progress and support efforts to build a strong safety culture. In order to achieve this certification, gap analysis was undertaken at all sites as well as audits conducted by Lenzing’s own in-house safety experts, which were also validated externally by an independent certification body, using remote and on-site auditing.

Maintaining a robust health and safety communication framework, encourages shared learning and preventative action following incidents. The reporting processes were enhanced with the introduction of a safety dashboard at the corporate level to support the safety cross and safety triangle concepts. This is intended to maintain transparency and streamline the management review and reporting tools, whilst using business analytics to provide an interactive overview across the group.

The new structure within the Global Quality, Environment, Safety and Health (QESH) team allowed the company to streamline the global meeting structure, following the four technology streams within the business. This enables a full understanding of all averse events relating to health and safety to be obtained, with the relevant event details and learning outcomes at the corporate level shared via a regular performance review.

In 2021, Lenzing continued to improve the management of hazardous substances across the group with the introduction of the chemicals database, which will allow the systematic organization of all relevant data sheets, the collection and presentation of current data and information to all employees.

For more information about Lenzing’s SHE policies, please visit the Lenzing website.

Focus on improving safety performance

Current performance compared to previous years

As these figures are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, this should be considered when comparing them with previous time periods.

In 2021, zero fatal accidents were recorded. Lenzing also saw a reduction in the rate of recordable work-related injuries for employees from 0.92 in 2020 to 0.81 in 2021. The rate for contractors working on Lenzing sites also dropped slightly from 0.86 in 2020 to 0.78 in 2021. Meanwhile, the rate for all work-related injuries rose to 3.0 in 2021 from 2.46 in 2020 for employees and to 1.59 in 2021 from 1.48 in 2020 for contractors. This may be partly attributable to increased activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, as Lenzing’s production sites returned to full production. Thus, the changes in injury figures in this report should be interpreted with caution and may not be indicative of an ongoing trend, as opposed to random year to year variation.

High-consequence work-related injury

In terms of broader personnel safety performance, high-consequence work-related injury events (i.e. injuries from which the worker cannot, does not, or is not expected to recover fully to pre-injury health status within six months) have remained at zero since 2019.