Occupational Safety and Health Promotion

Material impacts, risks and opportunities

Chemical production means having to deal with hazardous substances and their effects in chemical reactions. This involves an increased risk of workplace accidents and damage to health. As a chemical producer, WACKER also has a risk of workplace accidents with consequences on employee health. This is especially the case for our employees who work in or close to production plants. We counteract these potentially negative impacts by introducing safety measures as well as conscious promotion of employee health to enable us to reduce the financial risk of high sickness costs as a result of accidents or occupational diseases and the related loss of labor or production.

Strategy

We strive to create a workplace that is free from risk for people and the environment. We endeavor to avoid accidents and safety-critical incidents, paying particular attention to the hazard potential posed by chemical processes. The health of employees and maintaining their ability to perform are important goals for us as a company. This includes creating working conditions that encourage a healthy lifestyle and taking preventative action to avoid work-related ill health and accidents. Our clear safety regulations and procedures and a safety culture practiced by all play a key role here. What is more, we set great store by health promotion to boost employee wellbeing and reduce long-term health risks. These integrated approaches help to create a safe and healthy working atmosphere that increases employee satisfaction and, at the same time, reduces the risk of workplace accidents and occupational diseases. The Group regulation governing occupational health and safety defines suitable principles and responsibilities. The Group coordinators for health and safety are responsible for implementation and compliance. A large number of documented procedures transfer the strategy to specific areas of work and situations.

Actions

Workplace accident prevention policies

To reduce negative impacts of workplace accidents and plant safety incidents on our workforce, we have defined quantitative Group targets that are reviewed yearly. Together with managerial employees in Germany, we also define safety targets to this effect in annual target setting.

Our occupational safety system includes regular hazard assessments and monitoring of work areas in line with the international ISO 45001 standard. We record all incidents that are relevant in terms of safety, health and the environment throughout the Group in a timely manner in a central system, analyze the reports and take action.

All employees are given mandatory safety training. Our portfolio in Germany alone has over 40 online training courses, ranging from general safety training to specific issues such as hazardous locations. In the event of an emergency, we have multi-stage emergency response plans that vary according to the area and severity of the incident.

Our WACKER Safety Plus (WSP) program for German sites enables us to raise awareness among employees about unsafe practices. Safety patrols, discussions with the workforce and emergency drills are all part of this safety initiative. Employees can use our idea management system to report safety-critical situations, enabling us to identify hazards at an early stage. We give special recognition to plants without any reportable accidents. We discuss important issues with company and workers’ representatives at our quarterly Occupational Safety Committee meetings (as defined in Section 11 of the German Safety at Work Act (ASiG)).

In 2024, we launched our Safety Culture@WACKER initiative to record WACKER’s safety operations comprehensively and, for the first time, globally. Under it, we intend to permanently improve our safety culture and ultimately reduce our accident figures to zero. To this end, we analyzed our sites and their approach to safety while also comparing them against industry benchmarks and have established actions for improvement. We will be running a global safety campaign in March 2025. This campaign includes various communication measures to increase safety awareness across the entire company, ranging from posters and banners with an overarching safety claim to townhall meetings and other activities. It is accompanied by a series of measures in leadership, lifesaving rules & risk perception, investigations, and management of consequences.

Promoting health systematically – avoiding high health expenses

We offer occupational medical care and workplace health promotion for all employees with permanent contracts. We have set out global standards in a compulsory directive, implementation of which is verified by a yearly self-assessment questionnaire that the local officers responsible answer. Our Health Services department is involved in job-related hazard assessments, including assessment of mental stress by the Occupational Psychology team.

WACKER offers various services, such as company medical teams, vaccinations and preventive medical checkups. These measures have a positive impact on all our employees.

All our German sites fulfill the requirements of the German Social Accident Insurance association’s DGUV Regulation 2, the German Safety at Work Act (ASiG), and the German Ordinance on Preventive Occupational Health Care (ArbMedVV). For medical emergencies, we have a rescue chain in place and our larger sites, such as Burghausen and Nünchritz, have a plant rescue service available around the clock.

The number of recognized occupational diseases at our German sites is very low. In the past, they were mainly respiratory tract and cancer diseases due to earlier instances of contact with asbestos.

In 2024 too, there were various health-related packages at WACKER, particularly at our largest production site in Burghausen. These are organized and coordinated via Burghausen Health Services, which also offers prevention programs for employees who work shifts.

In addition to analyzing accidents and work-related ill health, we look at the down times and sickness rates of our employees compared with the national average in Germany to promote the effectiveness of our actions.

Target

Safety is of the utmost priority for WACKER. We aim every year, for example, to fully avoid chemical accidents at our production sites with missed workdays and prevent severe plant-safety incidents.

Chemical accidents include eye injuries caused by hazardous substances, or incidents where hazardous substances with defined hazard statements come in contact with the skin or are inhaled. Classification is based on uniform requirements that apply throughout the Group.

There were five chemical accidents with missed workdays in the reporting year (2023: two). There were no serious plant safety incidents.

Please refer to the ESRS E2 – Pollution section for further information.

100 percent of our own workforce is covered by the company management system. The number of fatalities as a result of work-related injuries and work-related ill health relates to our own workforce and to other employees working on WACKER sites, e.g. employees of partner companies in the value chain that are working on WACKER premises. There was one fatal occupational accident at a partner company in the reporting year.

All in all, there were 94 recordable workplace accidents in the reporting year. This figure includes all accidents involving more than one missed workday. The rate is calculated based on 1,000,000 working hours.