Accident-free: Bronze Safety Award for the Weißenstein Site
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The Degussa Weißenstein site in Austria has been presented with the Bronze Safety Award for three years without work-related accidents. The award did not go to any individual facility or plant, but to the entire site, which counts 111 employees. "A systematic approach to safety within the framework of an organized management system is just as much a prerequisite as is the active participation by everybody concerned in the sense of avoiding and reducing hazards at the site,” Peter Täubl, occupational safety and health officer in Weißenstein, explained.
The Group’s safety-improvement competition for the gold, silver and bronze Degussa Safety Awards was introduced as an incentive to get closer to achieving the ambitious target of zero accidents at work year after year. The gold award goes to plants that do not report any accidents resulting in three or more days absence from work in fifteen years, or that do not report a single day’s absence from work as a result of work-related accidents for at least ten years. The different yardsticks reflect different international standards on accident reporting. |
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| Dr. Helmut Wipfler, Works Manager at Weißenstein (left) and Peter Täubl, Occupational Safety and Health Officer, Weißenstein (right) were handed the award by Rainer Kohlen. | |
Dr. Rainer Kohlen from the Environment, Safety, Health, Quality Department stressed that “with these achievements, the Weißenstein works have significantly contributed towards the successful safety work performed by the Degussa Group as a whole. The fact that it has been possible to reduce accident frequency at the corporate level by 70 percent since 2001 is the successful result of joint efforts at all of our sites.” The Weißenstein site, which is located in the Austrian Federal State of Carinthia, is the birthplace of industrial hydrogen peroxide production (1911: the “Weißenstein Method”). In addition to hydrogen peroxide, peracetic acid, polycarboxylic acids and various specialty products are manufactured that are all bundled under the umbrella of the Degussa Building Blocks Business Unit.
Go to the Building Block Business Unit website.