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Occupational Health & Safety
We continue to pursue excellence in occupational health and safety to better protect our employees, contractors, neighbors and the environment from hazards.
Our employees are our most valuable asset, and it is our responsibility as an employer to provide a safe work environment and promote wellness across the workforce. This focus on health and safety has been deeply ingrained at Cabot throughout our history and serves as a central theme in our culture. Our goal is for all employees to return home in the same condition as when they arrived at work.
As part of our Drive to Zero initiative, we have set a long-term goal of having no injuries at our facilities worldwide. Recognizing that it may take many years to achieve this ambitious goal, we also established a nearer-term target of being represented in the top 10% of our peer chemical companies for safety performance. To help meet these goals, we provide training to all employees on safety procedures that meets or exceeds all applicable government regulations and internal standards.
People Safety
We are proud that in 2020, we achieved a total recordable incident rate of 0.24 for all operations globally. This metric includes all injuries sustained by employees, contractors or visitors while working on a Cabot-owned facility and represents a 48% drop in our recordable injury rate compared to 2019. This is a significant improvement in performance over 2019 and represents 96% progress toward achieving our 2025 goal. We also achieved a global lost time incident rate of 0.16, indicating a positive trend in reducing severe incidents. The LTIR for 2020 represents a 43% reduction over the 2019 rate, achieving 88% of our 2025 goal.
Process Safety
In 2020, we experienced four Tier 1 and eight Tier 2 process safety events which caused one lost-time injury. The primary root causes for 2020 Process Safety events were linked to mechanical integrity, emphasizing the importance of having a comprehensive program to reduce these events. Our total of twelve Tier 1 and 2 events represents a 20% improvement over 2019 and a positive step towards our 2025 process safety goal.
COVID-19 Public Health Crisis
We established global programs to protect the health and safety of all employees and contractors during the pandemic.The goal of these programs was to protect the well-being of our employees and communities through enhanced safety measures while also continuing to produce materials for critical supply chains, such as products needed for medical equipment and infrastructure applications. These safety measures included reducing employee density, enhancing cleaning and enacting distancing protocols at all sites, along with providing personal protective equipment (PPE) to employees and modifying work procedures to reduce risk.
National Safety Council Award
Cabot’s leadership in safety performance was recognized by the National Safety Council (NSC).
Learning from the best — Cabot’s Chairman’s Award recipients
In 2019, our carbon black site in Shimonoseki, Japan, joined five other Cabot locations as recipients of our Chairman’s Award.
This recognition is given to those manufacturing and research and development sites that have consistently demonstrated excellence in all areas of SH&E performance. The Shimonoseki, team attributes their success to a culture where employees and contractors communicate closely to identify and solve issues. Working together and helping each other are the norm, and all are encouraged and expected to ask questions.
Safety Program Improvements
We have implemented several changes to help make our safety programs more efficient and robust.
Including refreshed educational campaigns to prevent hand and finger injuries and to reduce hazards, as well as using a more comprehensive contractor safety qualification process to help ensure we are selecting partners whose SH&E values are in line with our own. We also implemented a global system for collecting and maintaining safety data sheets for the materials used at our locations, and continued progress on a comprehensive review of our corporate SH&E standards.
