We regard occupational safety and protection of our employees’ health as one of our company’s core tasks. This entails preventing on-the-job accidents and occupational illnesses, identifying and assessing potential hazards, maintaining comprehensive risk management and designing a healthy working environment. Occupational health and safety at Bayer means not just compliance with laws, regulations and codes, but also active and common commitment at the workplace – with a focus on people. Among other aspects, this involves integrating employees into decision-making processes at the workplace, ensuring functioning communication and creating a strong sense of responsibility among supervisors for their employees.

The rate of occupational injuries with lost workdays at Bayer has been decreasing for several years. In 2014 intensive training and awareness-raising once again helped enable the Bayer subgroups and service companies to report a reduction in injury figures. more

Through the Group-wide Top Performance in Process and Plant Safety (TOPPS) initiative, Bayer is continuously working to improve the safety culture and corresponding standards in plants and laboratories and to optimize safety technology. The corresponding Bayer Group Regulation “Process and Plant Safety” specifies uniform procedures and standards. The methods and criteria for identifying and assessing the risks posed to people and the environment by plants and processes underwent further development and were globally standardized.

A globally standardized KPI for plant safety incidents, Loss of Primary Containment (LoPC), applies to all Bayer plants and is integrated into Group-wide safety reporting. LoPC refers, for example, to chemicals in amounts above defined thresholds leaking from their primary container, such as pipelines, pumps, tanks or drums, and is thus an indicator of incidents in production facilities. more

Transportation safety has a very high priority within the Bayer safety culture. The relevant Bayer Group directive specifies procedures that ensure all transported materials are handled in line with applicable regulations and their hazard potential. Logistics service providers are selected following a defined procedure, and their fulfillment of safety and quality standards is assessed regularly. Under the directive, people responsible for implementation are appointed in every organizational unit concerned.

We classify critical incidents during the transportation of our products as transport incidents. These include accidents that cause personal injury, significant damage to property, environmental impact through the release of substances, or leakage of hazardous materials. We record transport incidents using defined criteria. Assessment is based on the leaked load, graded according to the volume and hazardous material class, personal injury and blocked transportation routes. We take into account both our own chemical transport movements and those we commission and pay third parties to perform on our behalf. more