Safety Leader

Advancing our Safety Initiative activities

Over the past year, safety has remained the first item on the agenda of Euro Chlor meetings. Launched a decade ago, our Safety Initiative aims to continuously improve our industry’s safety performance and strive for its vision of zero incidents.

Euro Chlor has been organising multiple safety training sessions for members and partners. These not only covered the physical properties and potential hazards related to chlorine and caustic, but also the safety aspects related to different construction materials and pieces of equipment. Over the past 12 months, significant effort has also gone into rolling out a new interactive safety game. This is a board game designed for operators to simulate and respond to safety incidents and issues. Recognising the need for well-trained game facilitators, the Euro Chlor team conducted six training sessions for more than 17 colleagues. Members remain enthusiastic about the game’s role, mentioning that it is applicable to real-life plant situations, fosters teamwork, and fills knowledge gaps. Based on the experience gained during the sessions though, some adaptations will be made in the coming months to make it even more useful.

A lot of attention has also been given to the follow-up of our Commitment on safe loading and unloading of chlor-alkali related products. This commitment was initiated by the Euro Chlor Management Committee as a reaction to an increasing number of incidents seen around the transport of our products. This led to the development of a new training session for transport companies to improve safe unloading at customer site and to some members further strengthening their interactions with customers on this topic. However, despite some members further strengthening their interactions with customers on the topic. Despite all these efforts, incidents still occur. As such a new instructional video on the safe loading/ unloading of key chemicals is in development, aiming to provide more accessible guidance to drivers and site operators.

Finally, the Safety and Transport (GEST) Working Group has diligently continued its work in updating safety documents to ensure the continuous improvement of practices across the industry. Over the past year, five GEST recommendations were revised, ensuring that active documents reflect the current best practices. All our technical documentation can be found here.

Process Incidents and losses and Loss of Primary Containment (LOPC) incidents per chemical

In 2023, our process incidents and losses remained constant compared to 2022 with 4.96 incidents per million tonnes of chlorine (4.90 in 2022). This translates, in absolute numbers, to a total of 36 process incidents reported via our annual sustainability survey.

As illustrated in the first graph, these results tend to fluctuate. We will now strive to move towards, and even below, the 2021 level.

Since we launched our third Sustainability Programme in 2021, we have expanded our reporting on process incidents and losses to include a breakdown of the LOPC incidents for each chemical. Before that only the aggregated number was communicated.

The results show that, whereas in 2022 the main incidents were related to chlorine, they have since shifted to caustic soda in 2023, particularly during loading/ unloading operations. The upcoming video for transport companies is intended to help bring this number down.

Incident reporting

Ten years of consistent efforts by Euro Chlor members, the General Technical Committee (GTC) and Safety and Transport (GEST) Working Group led to a steadily increasing incident reporting rate of 86% in 2021. Since 2022 however there has been a decline, with rates dropping to 66% in 2022 and further to 55% in 2023.

This downturn may be attributed to persistent economic pressures and mounting workloads, which continue to place strain on production sites. On a positive note we have been informed that for some incidents the reports were declared to be ready but in need of company/ legal clearance, so we may receive them soon.

The Euro Chlor team is committed to work with the membership to reduce the workload for the reporting as much as possible as it remains key to learn from past incidents to avoid them in the future.

Lost Time Injuries (LTIs)

As previously noted, Euro Chlor has significantly bolstered its safety efforts in recent years through safety training sessions and thorough discussions on past incidents across all pertinent groups to minimise the number of LTIs per million working hours.

We saw an encouraging result with the LTIs for member company staff and contractors decreasing from 2.68 per million working hours in 2022 to 2.42 in 2023. Whilst this marks progress, zero remains the number to strive for.

Occupational Safety dealt with by the Health Working Group (HWG)

Over the past year, Euro Chlor’s HWG published a leaflet to help colleagues working in Safety, Health, Environment and Quality to maintain awareness of legacy mercury in case companies find it on-site in the future.

They also finalised their ‘Health 13’ document, detailing what emergency departments can do to treat people exposed to chlorine gas. It outlines treatment options based on decades of experience. The Group is now working to raise awareness of this document amongst healthcare professionals and authorities.

Additionally, the HWG are exploring topics for new documents including general wellbeing, mental health, keeping an aging workforce healthy and respectfully reintegrating people after a burn-out.

Transport incidents for chlor-alkali related products

No transport incidents were reported in 2023, compared to one incident involving caustic in 2022.

Transportation of chlorine

As chlorine is mostly used on-site or transported to neighbouring sites via pipelines, its transportation percentage has fluctuated between 4% and 6% over the past 15 years. The graph shows the absolute tonnes of chlorine transported via the different modes over the years. We see a slight decrease in 2023 compared to 2022.

Transportation of caustic

Unlike chlorine, most of the produced caustic is transported. 

The graph shows the absolute tonnes of caustic transported via the different modes since 2020, the start of our measurements. The 2023 total volume of caustic transported through public areas returned to 2021 levels, reaching 13.1 million tonnes compared to 11.1 million tonnes in 2022. 

Shipping reemerged as the primary transport option, surpassing road transport.