Managing our Workplace Health Safety & Environmental Responsibilities

Good management of work health safety and environment is an essential part of doing business today. At CSR, we regard management of work health safety and environment as an integral and fundamentally important part of our business. We believe that all injuries, occupational illnesses and environmental incidents can be prevented.

Our managers are held accountable for work health safety and environment performance, and all employees are expected to take personal responsibility for their actions, and to be involved in improvement initiatives and developing and setting standards.

We have adopted a common approach across the company to managing work health safety and environment. All businesses are required to implement these standards. There are strict WHSE protocols for contractors as well as for employees to ensure the safety and well being of all people on CSR sites.

We recognise that we get the best results by involving the people that do the work in analysing risks and defining the best way of doing the work.

CSR Work Health, Safety and Environment Policy

At CSR, we care for and protect each other, our business, our customers, the community and our environment; with the aim of building a sustainable, profitable and growing enterprise.

The workplace health and safety of our people and the preservation of the environment in which we operate are core values at CSR.

Consistent with this, CSR will strive to achieve zero harm, in respect to workplace health, safety and the environment by:

Complying with the laws, regulations and CSR operational policies and standards;

• Establishing measurable WHSE objectives and targets, recognising and celebrating their achievement;

• Identifying, assessing and controlling hazards and adopting a proactive approach that will strive to eliminate or reduce the risk to an acceptable level;

• Communicating with employees, contractors, visitors and external stakeholders of hazards and aspects that may impact them; our business and/or the environment;

• Identifying, implementing, monitoring and reinforcing the safe behaviours we expect in our business to eliminate unsafe acts and practices.

• Providing appropriate workplace health, safety and environmental training to employees and contractors;

• Considering the environmental lifecycle implications of our operations and products;

• Investigating incidents and sharing the learnings with all applicable stakeholders to prevent re- occurrences.

• Consulting with employees and contractors, and communicating with external stakeholders to continually improve the workplace health, safety and environmental performance in our workplaces.

All employees, contractors and visitors are expected to commit to this policy and the CSR Board and Management will provide leadership and the necessary resources and training to ensure compliance.

Updated 14 June 2017.

CSR Work Health, Safety and Environment Standards

The CSR WHSE Standards provide the framework for management of workplace health, safety and environment at CSR, by clearly setting out the standards we require our people to meet. Managers and supervisors are required to provide leadership in relation to WHSE by:

• effectively implementing the requirements of the Standards
• developing and sustaining a strong culture of working safely and continuous improvement
• setting stretch improvement goals
• allocating sufficient resources to achieve the goals.

The CSR WHSE Management Standards are divided into the sections shown below to incorporate the generic continuous improvement cycle common to management standards for Safety (AS/NZ 4801 & OHSAS 18001), Quality (ISO 9001) and Environment (ISO 14001).

There are four primary drivers behind CSR’s WHSE Management System:

• Protect the health and safety of people.
• Minimise environmental harm.
• Operate within the law.
• Ensure people know their WHSE responsibilities and how they are to be met.

The five sections of the CSR WHSE Standards are:

1. Commitment and Policy

   Our WHSE Policy and WHSE Policy Commitments demonstrates our commitment to improving workplace, health, safety and environmental performance.

2. Planning

   To ensure that it is effective, the planning process at each level of the business takes into consideration:

   • identification, access and communication of legal and company requirements
   • setting challenging improvement targets and objectives, developing and maintaining WHSE improvement plans with clearly defined actions, allocation of responsibilities and completion dates.
3. Implementation

   Effective implementation will ensure that health, safety, and environment focus is maintained on critical activities ensuring:

   • responsibilities and accountabilities are in place and understood at each level of the business.
   • our people are trained to ensure competency in completing their job tasks.
   • effective communication and consultation mechanisms are in place.
   • reporting of business activities is in place including the tracking of key indicators and initiatives.
   • effective identification, assessment and control of workplace health, safety and environmental hazards and their associated risk.
   • control of documentation to maintain its relevance and regular review.
   • emergency situations are identified and controlled appropriately.
4. Monitor & Measure

   By measuring, monitoring and evaluating WHSE performance, CSR is able to take preventative or corrective action to improve performance, including:

   • injury/incident reporting, recording , investigation and corrective actions.
   • health assessment and management.
   • management of appropriate records.
   • audit of systems and tracking of actions to address non compliances identified.
5. Management Review

   All parts of CSR are required to undertake regular reviews of performance to improve the WHSE management system as part of continuously improving WHSE performance.

Sharing ideas and lessons from experience

To achieve our vision of “zero harm” it is important that we share learnings both in terms of good practice that we implement, as well as understanding what went wrong.

CSR has established a WHSE SharePoint site, which provides one place to access model forms and documents to assist our sites in meeting the requirements of the CSR WHSE Standards. It also allows the communication of incident alerts to applicable stakeholders so that learnings can be shared across CSR.

WHSE Audits

Regular internal audits are supported by external audits and are conducted to improve performance and ensure compliance with governmental requirements and CSR standards.

External audits

External auditors inspect CSR operations on a cyclic basis to ensure compliance with the WHSE Standards, to identify any systemic deficiencies and compliance issues. Recommendations from these audits are reviewed, actions developed, assigned to applicable personnel, and monitored to completion.

Asbestos Information

CSR’s historic involvement in asbestos 

The involvement of CSR and its subsidiaries in asbestos litigation in Australia and the US arises from the mining of raw asbestos fibre by one of CSR’s subsidiaries, as well as in Australia with the sale by CSR and by certain of its subsidiaries of asbestos-containing products.  CSR’s involvement in asbestos mining and manufacture of products containing asbestos ceased in 1966 and 1977 respectively.

CSR’s commitment and claims philosophy

CSR has been settling claims in Australia since 1989  and the US since 1993.  CSR continues to assess all claims diligently and fairly and, where there is a demonstrated liability, CSR will seek to offer a fair settlement.  CSR’s policy is to meet all valid claims brought in Australia and the US on an equitable basis.    

CSR includes in its financial statements a product liability provision covering all known asbestos-related claims and reasonably foreseeable future claims. This provision is reviewed every six months based on independent expert advice in relation to the future incidence and value of asbestos related claims in the United States and Australia. The provision also includes a prudential margin above the aggregate of the central estimate of CSR’s total future asbestos liabilities. As at 30 September 2019, a product liability provision of $259.1 million has been made which includes a prudential margin of $26.7 million or 11.5 per cent above the central estimate of future liabilities.

CSR’s support of research into asbestos related diseases

Since 2010, CSR has sponsored the Asbestos Diseases Research Institute’s tissue biobank study.  The building of a comprehensive nationwide tissue biobank of considerable size incorporating serum, plasma, DNA, RNA and tumour tissue will permit the construction of a comprehensive catalogue of genomic abnormalities associated with mesothelioma in both tumour and control tissue, which will help researchers better understand the biology of the disease in an effort to try and achieve better clinical outcomes.  Information on the tissue bank (which will be very high quality and quite rare) will be made available to the international research community. The resources needed to establish the tissue bank are considerable and include the initial equipment, as well as access to trained nursing staff on site around the country to be ready to collect samples from mesothelioma sufferers. For further information visit: www.adri.org.au

Asbestos in the community

While CSR has not been involved   in the manufacture of asbestos for over 40 years, we recognise that the product is still found in the environment.  CSR believes the safe removal of asbestos is best done by properly accredited specialists, and there is a significant amount of information available on the safe handling and removal of asbestos. For more information on the safe handling of asbestos,  visit: www.asbestosawareness.com.au