Our Safety Record
Essential to our continuous progress in safety is our use of targets and metrics. By establishing targets and metrics, we maintain our focus on improving our safety record every year. The three primary corporate safety metrics we use are Recordable Incidents, Total Recordable Incident Rate, and Incident Severity.
Cabot applies the US Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) definition of a "Recordable Incident" across the globe. Unlike many companies, our metrics include contractors as well as employees. In addition to setting rigorous goals, our continuous improvement process includes conducting diligent root cause analysis, broadly sharing the learnings from each incident, planning and evaluating work before it is done, and implementing consistent global standards that go beyond compliance.
The TRIR metric is valuable because it identifies the number of Recordable Incidents per 200,000 hours worked. Since 2005, we have consistently demonstrated a TRIR between 0.30 and 0.50, placing Cabot's TRIR well below the average of our chemical industry peers. Although our TRIR is among the best of any global industrial manufacturing company, we continue to evaluate and implement additional opportunities to improve our safety performance. .
Although there are many different methods available to measure incident severity, we measure the number of recordable incidents that result in time away from work. Since 2000, the number of incidents resulting in lost time has decreased by over 65%. Cabot's Lost Day Rate for calendar year 2010 was 6.66 for employees and contractors combined. This is a significant improvement over the sustained excellent rates during the prior years.
| Process Safety Cabot's development of an internal metric for Process Safety Events. |
