Health, Safety, Environment & Security (HSES) Policy
At Ecovyst, we are fully committed to ensuring the health, safety, and well-being of our employees, our contractors, our customers, our community and the environment.
We strive for ethical and responsible working conditions that safeguard our neighbors and guide us towards a more sustainable future. We are dedicated to always “Doing the Right Things” and taking personal responsibility to better protect the environment and reduce our footprint.
Our HSES Policy focuses on safety, personal accountability and HSES performance. We center on continual improvement and voluntary participation in Responsible Care®, RC 14001® and ISO 14001.
HSE Perfect Days
At Ecovyst, we strive to make every day a HSE Perfect Day. We intend to complete each day without any significant safety injuries or environmental incidents. In 2019, we instituted our HSE Perfect Days process to measure our progress toward that goal and to drive continuous improvement in health, safety and environmental performance.
We define an “HSE Perfect Day” as a day without:
- OSHA recordable injuries
- First aids requiring professional assistance
- Level 1 or greater releases
- Deviations from environmental permits and/or HSE legal requirements
- HSE Notices of Violation
- Deviations from Life-Saving Behaviors
As an organization, we have set annual Perfect Day and Total Recordable Incident Rate goals and targets that link to performance and drive accountability.
Ecovyst’s Ecoservices and Catalyst businesses achieved “HSE Perfect Days” of 94% and 97% in 2021, for a combined score of 91%. That is, across all sites for all days in 2021, 91% of the days were “HSE Perfect Days”!
Our Perfect Days Performance has improved for both businesses and Ecovyst from 2019 to 2021, reflecting our commitment to HSE excellence. Overall, the percentage of Ecovyst Perfect Days has increased from 84% to 91% over this time period.
Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR)
Our unwavering goal is to become a leading company in HSE performance within the industries in which we participate. We are continuing to evolve our safety culture to one in which engagement, collaboration and safe behaviors come naturally in our drive to Best-in-Class performance. In 2021, we matched our 2020 performance, having acheived a significant downard trajectory in TRIR and top quartile safety performance for all ACC Companies, and sustained no Level 3 Releases for the fifth year in a row.
Learn more about our commitment to safety in our 2019 Sustainability Report.
Our HSE Management Systems
We have a comprehensive HSE management system that promotes continual improvement of HSE performance. This approach includes a “Plan-Do-Check-Act” system to evaluate risk, plan for improvements, implement controls, monitor processes, and make corrections or other improvements.
Our HSE management system is aligned with the ISO14001 and chemical industry RC14001® standards and reflects the commitments as established in our HSE Mission and Guiding Principles.
For over 15 years, our HSE management system has been certified to international standards. We continue to enhance our Plan-Do-Check-Act improvement process using these strategies.
Ecovyst Principles: Behavioral Safety and Operational Safety
We have global operating processes in place to protect our employees, the community, and the environment. We have robust systems to control processes, and any changes to those processes are reviewed before implementation to ensure the safety and well-being of all personnel.
Specifically, we have implemented the Ecovyst Principles, which are 20 tenets (10 Behavioral Safety and 10 Operational Safety), to help prevent workforce incidents and injuries, as well as to preserve asset integrity and avoid loss of containment.
While only a few of our plants in the United States are subject to the OSHA Process Safety Management Program (PSM) or the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Risk Management Program (RMP), we apply Best Practices across all of our facilities worldwide—going above and beyond local requirements to ensure the safety of our employees and the community.
Embracing Sustainability and Delivering Meaningful Environmental Stewardship
Protecting the environment through our activities is at the forefront of Ecovyst’s mission. It is our goal to reduce emissions across all of our facilities. Our functional teams work in conjunction with each other to develop environmental improvement opportunities by finding synergies between manufacturing, engineering, and the supply chain. The capital improvement process has generated multiple energy recovery solutions generated by these and other initiatives.
As an operations organization, we are focused on reducing our environmental footprint, including cleaner air and safer water. We have established 2025 and 2030 GHG Intensity, energy management and waste reduction goals, which we have translated into annual goals and targets in our drive to deliver measurable reductions. Learn more about our sustainability goals.
In 2021, we had zero Level 3 environmental releases from any of our sites. It is our goal to continue to have no Level 3 releases from our sites causing significant adverse impacts to the environment in 2022 and beyond.
We also are working towards a robust water management program and have a 2025 goal to implement water balances at all sites. We are 50% towards that goal and continue to share best practices.
We strive to reduce waste through process improvements and the search for beneficial new uses for our co-product material. We anticipate reducing hazardous waste generation rates by 40% in 2025 and also plan to reduce non-recyclable waste by 25%.
Examples of our Environmental Management System in Action
We know that it’s critical to have a robust environmental management system in place. Here are a few examples of ours at work:
- Across our facilities, we have completed environmental impact assessments that include an evaluation of energy efficiency impacts, waste, and recycling opportunities.
- The management of change (MOC) process evaluation tool, called eMOC, has significant considerations for the environmental impacts of process and operational changes. As a result, our capital improvement processes include evaluation of the HSE impact of any process modifications (including any effect on the environment and the community) and allow for management information regarding improvements that directly benefit the environment.
- The transportation risk assessment process evaluates the potential for environmental impacts and improvement opportunities based on the mode of transport and type of materials. We use this process to develop and implement evaluation and performance criteria for third-party relationships.