Goal:
_____
Further our commitment to zero injuries, occupational illnesses, and incidents
Roadmap to 2030
As we work towards our 2030 objectives, we focused our efforts in 2020 on:
01
Advancing our EHS culture by focusing on leading causes of injuries, changing mindsets and behaviors, and reducing exposure to high risk activities
02
Deploying ISO 14001 and Responsible Care® 14001 management systems across global manufacturing plants
03
Improving our systems and execution on alarm management, process control, human factors, and effective operating procedures to reduce Tier 1 and 2 incidents
Our comitment to health and safety
At DuPont, we re-commit ourselves to our core value of health and safety every single day.
Our commitment to delivering world-class health and safety is embodied in our company culture, our stakeholder engagement, and in the innovations we produce for the world. Above all else, we’re supporting the health and safety of our employees and contractors around the world—and we’re listening to our employees to understand how we can further enhance well-being in our workplaces and beyond.
Prioritizing employee health and safety during COVID-19
Throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic, DuPont placed the health, safety and wellbeing of its employees, contractors and their families as our highest priority. As a global market leader in personal protective equipment and components for medical and life-saving devices, we employed essential workers in multiple countries during the early stages of the pandemic and quarantine. While it was of critical importance to the global virus-fighting efforts that we kept running our plants and serving our customers, we focused first on protecting our population of DuPont workers.
We activated our global pandemic response team and met regularly to share information and leverage learnings across all our sites. We developed a “Safe Back to the Workplace” playbook to guide sites in implementing controls so that people would be protected from virus transmission while working at our sites. We also developed Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning guidance to help sites with evaluating and improving ventilation to minimize the possibility of aerosol transmission of the virus. Non-essential workers were asked to work from home to minimize the possibility of on-site transmission of COVID-19.
In December 2020, we developed the DuPont Vaccination Workstream Teams to plan for COVID-19 vaccinations for our employees in 2021. We developed the DuPont Vaccine Principles to guide the preparatory work to ensure that the maximum amount of employees could receive a vaccine in 2021 to be administered either offsite by local public health or onsite at our facilities where feasible, as permitted by local government.
For all of our work relative to our COVID-19 response, as well as our work to provide essential protective materials to our customers and communities, we received an ACC Responsible Care® Award for Outstanding COVID-19 Response Efforts from the American Chemistry Council.
Read more about how we supported health, safety, financial and well-being assistance during the quarantine in the 2021 GRI Index.
Environmental health and safety management system
Our Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Management System, which covers both employees and contractors, ensures that we continually prioritize our commitment to health and safety.
Our EHS management system conforms with the American Chemistry Council’s Responsible Care Management System® and ISO 14001. DuPont manufacturing sites in the U.S. have implemented a management system based on the plan-do-check-act continuous improvement model. The system provides us with processes to identify and evaluate hazards and risks associated with our product development and manufacturing processes, distribution, and other operations. We then establish goals and objectives to address any significant hazards and risks, taking the feedback and concerns of employees, contractors, communities, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders into consideration.
Employee health and well-being
At all sites, Integrated Health Services (IHS) staff and/or onsite workers’ compensation coordinators facilitate access to medical care related to occupational injury or illness. Our larger manufacturing and research sites have on-site clinics where IHS staff provide occupational care, render first aid, provide travel vaccinations, and provide referrals for non-occupational illness and injury. Many of our sites have an annual flu vaccine program and other programs, such as diminished capacity and fatigue management. IHS also coordinates annual health risk assessments to determine leading health concerns for our employee population and executes the Medical Surveillance Exams based on occupational risks and regulatory compliance. Priorities are noted by the EHS team. IHS provides training for emergency medical response at many locations, especially those at higher risk of natural disasters, and coordinates critical incident support provided by the Employee Assistance Program.
Health and safety innovations
Our portfolio includes many products developed to improve health and well-being, and make people safer, on a global scale. We create solutions that protect the world’s industrial workers and first responders from harm, and we’re developing advances in medical delivery and smart devices that will improve health outcomes for everyone, including some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Customers use our medical-grade resins and thermoplastics to create wearable medical devices, specialty medical aid devices, and various prosthesis elements. Combining our high-performance materials with our ultra-thin sensors, electronic ink, and 5G solutions could help to advance the field of telehealth and improve the speed and range of sharing medical information.
Learn more about how our materials supported healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Delivering Solutions to Global Challenges page of this report.
2020 performance:
- Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR): 0.261 (115 recordable cases)
- Days Away from Work Case (DAWC) rate: 0.052 (23 total DAWC)
Our delivering world-class health and safety performance Stories
Maintaining a safe and healthy environment
In July 2020, our Electronics & Industrial Interconnect Solutions site in Dongguan, China, celebrated the important milestone of reaching five years without a recordable injury for employees, and one year for contractors. The site also celebrated having no positive COVID-19 cases, despite hosting 179 essential workers on site.
Improving fire safety in buildings
DuPont Tyvek® FireCurb® is used on the outside of buildings and has been on the market for over a decade. It uses our patented halogen-free self-extinguishing technology which is designed to stop flames at the membrane and snuff them out.
Improving electrical safety and reliability
In 2020, to avoid the risk of people receiving electric shocks from high-voltage electrical equipment, our Electronics & Industrial site in Dayuan, Taiwan, completed a project to upgrade the high-voltage switchgear around its four main gas circuit breakers.
See all our delivering world-class health and safety perfomance stories
Read more stories about how DuPont is delivering world-class health and safety performance in our Stories Hub...
