Owens Corning Celebrates National Safety Month by Living Safely
Jun 7, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Originally published in Owens Corning's 2021 Sustainability Report
By 2030, we aspire to achieve the following goals:
- Make it impossible for injuries and illnesses to occur.
Ideally, we will do this by designing equipment and processes to eliminate risk. When an engineering solution isn’t possible, we will continue to evaluate and implement strong rules and policies and ensure use of appropriate protective equipment to keep people from hazards. - In new or newly acquired sites, achieve a level of safety at least equivalent to the rest of Owens Corning within one year.
In 2021, Owens Corning acquired vliepa GmbH, a German-based company specializing in the coating, printing, and finishing of nonwovens, paper, and film for the building materials industry. We have been working to apply our safety processes to their operations as we complete the acquisition of this company. - Emphasize the elimination of risks that could lead to the most serious injuries, rather than concentrating on only the most frequent ones.
We aspire to eliminate all employee, contractor, and visitor injuries and occupational illnesses at work and at home, beginning with the ones that have the most serious consequences. While Owens Corning has a long-standing commitment to safety, we recognize there is still work to do as we keep our eye on our 2030 goals.
Our recordable incident rate (number of injuries x 200,000 / total labor hours) in 2021 was 0.59. This is 81% below the industry average, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2021 (the most recent data available). In addition, 48% of our global facilities were injury-free in 2021. The severity of our incidents, measured by our lost-time injury frequency rate (lost workday cases x 1,000,000/total labor hours) was 1.69.
