Occupational Safety

Throughout the entire global organization, Celanese places the utmost importance on employee, process, contractor and community safety.

Safety first, always and everywhere

Our families, coworkers and communities count on us to keep ourselves and others safe in how we work and how we live. Staying safe always comes first.

We are taking a proactive approach to alleviate risk before an event occurs, transitioning from a site-specific approach to a global best-practice-driven one with consistent, companywide guidelines. We see true, sustainable performance as the result of employees and contractors working as a team to ensure the safety of themselves and their coworkers.

In 2011, we began to conduct Safety Culture Assessments across our global organization. The assessments follow a three-step process—employee and contractor surveys, respondent interviews and facility-specific strategy development. Our goal: to create and continuously strengthen a culture of safety by engaging our employees and contractors.

KeepSafe: building a safety culture at Celanese

KeepSafe is our commitment as individuals and as a company to safe practices and an injury-free workplace. Personal commitment and accountability are central to safety performance, ongoing training

programs are a key part of our drive to improve continuously and achieve our goal of zero incidents by 2015.

KeepSafe is not a program. It is our name for the culture of individual engagement and empowerment we are building at Celanese. It’s what we call our ongoing efforts to make safety an essential company value, to encourage all coworkers to see themselves as leaders in driving safe behaviors.

Improving contractor safety

Contractors are key to our success, and it is essential that they operate as safely as our employees. That is why we developed a set of tools and initiatives designed to embed Celanese safety values into our contractors’ day-to-day activities. Through upfront evaluations, hazard checklists, training, alliance councils, field assessments and annual evaluations, we achieved a 77 percent reduction in serious contractor injuries between 2007 and 2011.

As in all our safety efforts, our goal is continuous improvement. In 2011, we launched phase two with a new set of tools to further reduce contractor injuries, enhance training and expand our safety culture to include contractors. An added benefit: By focusing on outside contractors, we are effectively exporting safe practices when they leave to work for other companies.

Process Safety

We continuously review and refine our processes to help ensure the safety of our employees, contractors and communities.

Process safety: working proactively to control risk

At Celanese, our belief is that all incidents are preventable. Our expectation is zero accidents and zero defects. We continuously assess and work to improve our manufacturing processes to decrease any risk of releases of chemicals, fires, explosions and other dangerous events.

All Celanese manufacturing sites have developed a comprehensive Responsibility and Accountability Plan to help ensure the safety of our people, contractors and communities. We train numerous employees each year in process safety techniques through internal programs. We monitor process safety and environmental compliance on an ongoing basis, identifying opportunities to improve through regular audits by Celanese technical experts, our environmental health and safety (EHS) team, and third-party providers. Our 2011 focus was on reducing human error by best-practice sharing in our manufacturing conduct of operations.

We believe competent people and strong systems prevent process safety incidents. The Celanese process safety management system defines 21 elements of process safety. This comprehensive coverage aids in developing our commitment to process safety, understanding hazards and risks, managing those risks, and learning from our experience.

Product Stewardship

Environmental, health and safety impact is an integral consideration across the full lifecycle of Celanese Products.

Safe products, from design to disposal

Product stewardship is the assessment and management of risk associated with our products. It involves consistent, companywide coordination of toxicology, safety assessment, risk management, hazard communication and regulatory clearances. It’s a key priority at every stage of the product lifecycle, from concept and design through manufacture, marketing, distribution, use, recycling and disposal.

We are committed to being an industry leader in product stewardship, and we are continuously evolving to improve. In 2011, we implemented an enhanced global Product Stewardship Risk Management (PSRM) process, our next-generation, companywide system for managing potential effects of our products on health and the environment.

PSRM: thorough, collaborative risk management

The PSRM process represents a disciplined tool for applying sophisticated risk management techniques to help ensure that Celanese products and associated processes do not pose unreasonable risk to employees, customers, contractors, consumers or communities. An evolution of our previous product stewardship process, PSRM is centered on collaboration among Celanese, supply chain partners and customers to identify risks and manage them through appropriate mitigation plans.

We apply the process during the development of all new products and applications. It is a valuable tool for guiding each Celanese business line to manage risk prior to entering a market. We also utilize PSRM on products undergoing “trigger events”—changes including modification, new applications, new production processes, new packaging or changes in transportation methods.

Shared industry testing programs

Product and process safety are not just Celanese priorities. Maximizing product stewardship success is a broader concern that requires industry-wide collaboration. Sharing efforts and information with other global manufacturers pools key data and ensures that tests are not duplicated unnecessarily.

We are active participants in a number of shared testing programs such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s compulsory Screening Information Data Set program, as well as voluntary programs that include the High Production Volume Challenge and the Children’s Chemical Evaluation Program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We also are a member of 10 industry panels or consortiums associated with testing programs for REACH, the European Community regulation on chemicals and their safe use (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical Substances).

Safety Change Agents: encouraging safe behaviors, peer to peer.

The Safety Change Agent program is our global initiative to equip individuals to drive continuous improvement in safety at the facility level. Our goal is to remove obstacles to improvement among employees through peer leadership.

The program includes training to develop key employees at each facility, providing them with the skills and knowledge they need to encourage safe practices, recognize and redirect less-safe behaviors, and help identify and resolve unsafe conditions.

The program also provides a mechanism to support the exchange of ideas and best practices across Celanese. With Safety Change Agents, we hope to energize the organization and create a new driver of behavioral and cultural change.

Six key steps to global Celanese product stewardship.

Our PSRM process seamlessly integrates Celanese global management processes for addressing product-related risk associated with raw materials, recipes, handling, distribution, sale and end use based on data.

PSRM trigger events include a new product or application; a changed process or package, a newly identified environmental or health risk; a new supplier, customer or market; a new raw material, byproduct, impurity or waste issue

Products featured

Advanced ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene technology from Celanese helps make life pain-free for joint replacement patients through exceptional impact strength, slip properties and durability.

Our Guiding Principles

Celanese businesses bear full responsiblity for their environmental, health, employee safety, process safety and security performance. We strive to adhere to these Guiding Principles in all we do: