Prevention

Risk Management

The first step in ensuring the safety of our plants is to systematically identify and assess risks. This includes analyzing how well we control the energy (e.g. pressure, heat) existing in a process and determining what influence an individual fault might have on a chain of events leading up to a failure or accident. On completion of this comprehensive analysis, we specify safety measures to prevent the occurrence of undesirable incidents.

Safety Checks

No matter how many preventive measures are taken, accidents and environmentally relevant incidents can never be completely ruled out. When such incidents do occur, we make sure to learn from them so as to prevent a recurrence. Our initiative to improve the safety of pipe bridges has transitioned into a continuous program of checking for and repairing any corrosion damage.

In 2019, we conducted safety audits of our European sites in Halle, Holla, Jena, León, Plzeň and Stetten. WACKER issues awards and bonuses to employees of facilities that operate for sustained periods of time without a reportable accident.

Safety Training

We attach particular importance to providing ongoing training courses for our safety experts. These employees are regularly coached on topics such as plant safety and explosion-damage protection. Such safety training is also provided by Group experts at WACKER sites outside Germany. During the reporting period, we developed web-based interactive training courses on explosion-damage protection, for example, that were well attended.

Transport Safety

WACKER ensures that its products are safely stored and transported, especially where dangerous goods are involved. All sites at which WACKER produces and ships goods must comply with local and international transport regulations, as well as with our own strict safety standards.

In 2020, roughly 15 percent of total shipments in Germany were shipments of dangerous goods (2019: 14 percent). Some 12,000 trucks making dangerous goods shipments were inspected pursuant to the European Agreement concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road (ADR) in the shipping areas at our sites and warehouses in Germany (2019: 9,000 trucks). Failure rates have been low for years now. The rate for 2020 was 2.0 percent for hazardous-goods shipments by road from Burghausen, our largest site (2019: 2.8 percent).

As elsewhere, we rely on well-trained employees for transport safety. We offer practical classroom and online training courses, for example, on the proper way to ship dangerous goods and secure freight.

We regularly review aspects of transport safety with our logistics providers in Germany, e.g. during our annual Supplier Day. If deficiencies are found, we agree on improvements. WACKER imposes stringent safety requirements on its logistics providers. These are not only set out in the corresponding contractual agreements, but also underpinned by a comprehensive requirements profile.

For products with a high hazard potential, we use packaging and tanks of the highest quality. When distributing our products, we record any transport incidents that do not involve dangerous goods, as well as those that have no negative impact on people or the environment. These incidents are a key input into the annual ratings of our logistics providers. In 2020, we recorded a total of four transport incidents in Germany involving dangerous goods, compared with five in 2019.