Safety

We believe that any loss of life in the workplace is unacceptable and that all injuries are preventable. We recognise that we are all responsible for providing and maintaining a safe workplace. Our business inherently exposes some of our workers to safety risks. Safety, as one of Glencore’s Values, drives how we do business, and the safety of our workforce always comes first.

Why SafeWork and how has it evolved, watch the animation

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Why SafeWork and how has it evolved, watch the animation

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Why SafeWork and how has it evolved, watch the animation

Our approach

We are committed to protecting our workforce by creating safe workplaces, where we continually work towards improving safety performance through controls that eliminate and mitigate residual risks. We maintain a proactive safety culture, led by strong and visible leadership, and implement management systems with the appropriate controls in place for the management of our safety risks.

We focus on increasing our workforce’s capability to work safely and empower them to stop work when it is not safe. We require an effective health and safety management system at each industrial asset for the management of safety risks, designed to ensure the integrity of plant and equipment, structures, processes and protective systems, as well as the monitoring and review of critical controls.

Committed to operating safely

In South Africa, our ferroalloys business partnered with three different suppliers to develop a cutting-edge person-to-vehicle detection system - the first of its kind fitted to diesel vehicles. Read more

Committed to operating safely

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Implementing our safety management system

SafeWork is our approach to eliminating fatalities. SafeWork has a set of minimum expectations and mandatory Fatal Hazard Protocols (FHPs), Life-Saving Behaviours and safety tools, which our industrial assets must implement. We believe consistent application of SafeWork through strong, visible leadership drives a culture of safe operating discipline and will get our people home safe.

In 2021, we relaunched SafeWork following Group-wide reviews of its implementation and adoption. SafeWork 2.0 builds on the learnings from safety-related incidents and establishes greater accountability for safety in our workplaces.

We require an effective safety management system at each industrial asset to support SafeWork implementation, and the integrity of plant and equipment, structures, processes and protective systems, as well as the monitoring and review of critical controls and the identification and management of lessons learned from incidents.

SafeWork is built on a set of minimum expectations and mandatory protocols, standards, behaviours and safety tools. We believe well-led, consistent application of SafeWork will drive operating discipline and can prevent fatal accidents at all our industrial assets.

Core to our approach is our risk management system, through which we systematically identify, assess and manage safety hazards and credible risk scenarios associated with our industrial assets. We let our people know that we expect every individual, all employees and contractors, to take responsibility for their own safety, and for the safety of their colleagues and the communities in which they work.

We apply our minimum performance expectations at all our industrial assets, while recognising that each region, commodity, industrial asset and workplace is unique, and our industrial assets implement our management approach via local health and safety practices and management systems.

The scorecard for our Chief Executive Officer’s variable compensation includes 30% for key performance indicators relating to ESG matters, of which half is for safety performance and half for progress towards our 2026 and 2035 industrial emissions reduction targets.

KCC 360 Safety

Case study: Safety in the DRC

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KCC 360 Safety

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Case study: Safety in the DRC

Driving continuous improvement

Our industrial assets report high-potential risk incidents (HPRIs) as part of our strategy to reduce repeat incidents and, as such, we do not target a reduction in this metric. The internal reporting of HPRIs allows for the identification of activities that need prioritising to further advance our learning and safety performance. We share learnings from HPRIs across the Group.

Contractor safety management

We expect anyone on our site, including contractors, to comply with the same safety requirements as our direct employees, and to meet our safety training standards.

Recognising that contractor safety incidents are a contributing factor to our safety performance, we have developed a Contractors and Suppliers HSEC&HR Management Standard. The Standard sets out the mandatory requirements for the management of contractors and suppliers with respect to health, safety, environment, social performance and human rights (HSEC&HR) risks and compliance against our HSEC&HR requirements.

The Standard requires all our industrial commodity departments to develop and implement a contractors and suppliers HSEC&HR management framework, which includes conducting a risk assessment to identify, assess and define controls for the management of HSEC&HR risks, opportunities and impacts arising from the use of contractors and suppliers and their work.