Health & safety

At CCR Refinery, we believe that all employees and subcontractors are entitled to a work environment offering the very best safety conditions and ensuring they’ll return home safe and healthy every day. We seek to identify situations that pose a potential risk as well as the fundamental causes of all incidents and accidents that occur, to create a strong and reliable culture of safety.

At CCR Refinery, we believe that all employees and subcontractors are entitled to a work environment offering the very best safety conditions and ensuring they’ll return home safe and healthy every day. We seek to identify situations that pose a potential risk as well as the fundamental causes of all incidents and accidents that occur, to create a strong and reliable culture of safety.

In our plant, workplace health and safety are everybody’s business. Management actively supports all health and safety initiatives, from the smallest and most innocuous to the most complex. For our employees, this commitment means reexamining their practices to detect and correct those that carry risk. We also seek to improve employee well-being by promoting healthful lifestyles and physical activity.

Since the beginning in 1931, CCR Refinery has made enormous progress in workplace health and safety. The sustained efforts of management and employees have contributed to making this plant a safer place. The progress has been such that, today, it is not unrealistic to aspire to an injury-free workplace—our goal is to achieve and maintain a perfect zero accident score in line with Glencore definitions and standards. The fact that CCR Refinery has maintained world-class health and safety performance record over the past five years is a true illustration of the success of our approach:

• Reportable accident frequency¹ of less than 5 per million hours worked in the last five years
• A lost-time accident frequency¹ of less than 1.25 per million hours worked in the last five years.

¹ Accident frequency based on millions of hours worked

We owe this success to creating an environment that puts safety first. This is an unprecedented achievement and representative of a culture in which prevention and the well-being of employees are not a challenge, but rather a daily commitment.

Our continuous improvement in health and safety performance has been the result of progressive management methods. Throughout the 80s and 90s, health and safety management programs focused primarily on compliance with legal requirements. The 2000s were an opportunity to implement a systems approach (ISO) based on risk management. The STOP program was instituted in 2002, followed by the PASS program in 2008. The Glencore Safework Program, introduced in 2019, incorporated the practices already acquired through the PASS program, which was dropped. This laid the groundwork for new programs in the 2010s that emphasized individuals, celebrated safe behaviours, and nurtured a culture of health and safety.

This continuous improvement in health and safety performance puts CCR Refinery today at the forefront of industry compared to our North American and global competitors.