Occupational safety and health

Occupational safety

At BASF, we commit to establishing a safe and secure work environment, fostering risk-based behaviors and adhering thesecure work practices. Leveraging our expertise, we consistently refine and enhance our requirements and training initiatives.

Cultivating a safety culture through diverse activities and campaigns
Overarching risk classification being assessed in the individual HIRA
Implementation of the new BASF occupational safety KPI

BASF launched the nationwide Global Safety Day (GSD) campaign 2023 in Greater China under the theme “Safety, our way of life!”. More than 300 activities were organized both online and offline, attracting over 37,000 person-times participation from 39 legal entities including both BASF employees and contractors to strengthen their safety knowledge and awareness.

In 2023, the 4th Greater China EHS Awareness and Knowledge Competition (GEAR) was officially launched to promote continuous learning through by competition and positive safety culture at BASF. Over 3,300 participants, representing a 5% increase compared to the previous year, have enrolled in the self-learning and daily test modules.

Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (HIRA) is one of BASF occupational safety core elements. For all the routine tasks and workplaces, a systematic approach must be established to identify and analyze hazards, assess risks, evaluate and document the existing and new control measures. In 2023, the corporate requirement was revised to specify the overarching risk classification with revision cycle implementation, with the HIRA process elements streamlined as well.

BASF is committed to reporting according to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which is the world’s most widely used standards for sustainability reporting and includes the standard GRI 403 for Occupational Health and Safety.

Since January 2023, BASF has started to use a new KPI for occupational safety - High Severity Work Process-Related Injury Rate (HSI) for steering and target setting. The new KPI focuses on continuous reduction of high severity incident whose root causes are work-related and influenceable by BASF’s day-to-day management. It follows official recommendations of authorities and associations to concentrate on high-risk incidents in employees’ working environment. The target of HSI for BASF is no more than 0.05 per 200,000 working hours until year 2030.

In 2023, BASF has successfully recorded zero high severity work process related injury across all the sites and offices in Greater China.

Occupational health

A key component to the success of creating a safe and health work environment is commitment and awareness. At BASF, occupational health experts are dedicated to help keep employees healthy and safe at work and manage any relevant risks that are likely to give rise to work-related illnesses.

Worldwide standards for occupational health guided by experts
Health promotion continues to be a priority in improving the overall physical, mental and well-being of BASF employees
Ensuring medical emergency preparedness at sites and providing adequate health support to employees
Continuing to improve occupational health awareness to enhance health and safety

A key component to the success of creating a safe and health work environment is commitment and awareness. At BASF, occupational healthy experts are dedicated to help keep employees healthy and safe at work and manage any relevant risks that are likely to give rise to work-related illnesses.

We continued to improve the overall physical, mental and well-being of employees with health promotion and initiated the “I Care” project to assist in promoting health topics in Greater China. We also introduced the Health Campaign of “Go for Fun” to all sites in 2023. Monthly health talk materials on general health or hot health topics were developed and distributed to all sites for health awareness improvement.

Prompt first aid is crucial in a medical emergency. To ensure the first aider’s capability, an enhanced first aid training program was launched in Greater China in 2023. It includes increasing the training frequency, focusing on hands-on practice, introducing special effects make-up drills, enhancing trainers’ skill and first aiders screening.

The success of health care performance at BASF is measured using the Health Performance Index (HPI). The HPI consists of five main components: recognized occupational diseases, medical emergency preparedness, first aid, preventive medicine, and health promotion. With the highest score being 1.0, each component contributes a maximum of 0.2 to the total score. At BASF, we aim to reach a value of more than 0.9 every year. With the excellent HPI score of 0.97 in Asia Pacific for 2022, we once again reached the goal with HPI score of 0.99 for Greater China in 2023.

Competencies are vital for employees to succeed in the workplace and contribute to the success of creating a safe and healthy work environment. Thus, a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) workshop and a Chemical Health Risk Assessment (CHRA) workshop were conducted in Greater China to develop participants knowledge, improve their job skills as well as provide a better quality of work. These in-person workshops were led by both internal and external trainers. Topics on occupational health are also available online at BASF’s EHS Academy.