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 for the physical and social 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 healthy working conditions 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. WACKER’s safety, health and environmental requirements are summarized in standards that apply throughout the Group.

Compliance with Group standards is checked for production sites and technical centers on the basis of a self-assessment that uses predefined standards. This self-assessment is managed by Corporate Safety across the Group. We expect it to be completed in full and using monitoring processes to check this.

We record all incidents that are relevant in terms of safety, health and the environment and near-misses throughout the Group in a timely manner in a central system, analyze the reports and take action. Employees can use our idea management system to report safety-critical situations, enabling us to identify hazards at an early stage.

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.

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)).

The Safety Culture@WACKER initiative, launched in 2024, was rolled out globally in March 2025 through town hall meetings with the overarching safety slogan “for our safety”. Three safety principles and eight life-saving rules were unveiled, and corresponding implementation materials were distributed in all corporate units. We introduced accompanying training sessions, such as a new mandatory e-learning course in twelve languages, which 96.2 percent of all employees had already completed by the end of 2025, and a safety culture dialogue forum for safety officers and managers. Managers were supported in their role with regard to expectations, visibility, recognition and consequences with a toolkit, instructions and talk formats. Processes were fundamentally revised with a view to risk perception, dealing with important incidents, root cause analysis, taking action and reviewing its effectiveness, and learning together based on experience.

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.

All our German sites fulfill the statutory occupational health requirements set out in the accident prevention regulations of the German Social Accident Insurance association (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 2025 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 the pre-condition at 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.

Group target: no chemical accidents with missed workdays

There were six chemical accidents with missed workdays in the reporting year (previous year: five). 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 were no fatal occupational accidents in the reporting year (previous year: one).

All in all, there were 91 recordable workplace accidents in the reporting year (previous year: 94). This figure includes all accidents involving more than one missed workday. The rate is calculated based on 1,000,000 working hours. A total of 26.5 million hours were worked in 2025 (previous year: 26.5 million).