Prioritizing the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees, customers and partners are fundamental in everything we do. Our goal is to guarantee a safe working environment for our employees, and we are committed to taking responsibility for our own safety and for the safety of others. We also contribute to environmental safety.

Safety is our top priority

Our commitment:

Solid safety culture aiming for zero harm

Health and safety of our customers, employees and partners is our top priority.

We focus on continuous safety improvement and measure our performance with Lost Time Incident Frequency (LTIF) and Total Recordable Incident Frequency (TRIF).

In 2020, one of our greatest achievements was our Lost Time Incident Frequency (LTIF) score, improving to 1.3 (2019: 1.5) in December.

Safe working environment

We prioritize safety in our work environment, but also at our customer sites and that of our partners. We aim for zero harm by continuously improving our way of working, providing training and communicating safety principles as well as best practices to our personnel. To prevent incidents from happening and to raise general awareness we emphasize reporting risk observations and taking corrective actions. This way we strive for building a solid safety culture where safety is part everyday work life

On January 15, 2021, exactly two years had passed since the previous safety hazard (LTI) took place. Everyone contributed to a safe environment by making risk observations, and supervisors and managers investigated the observations and then implemented corrective actions.

2 accident-free years at Helsinki Plant

Safe products and services

Safe use of our products and care-free services is at the core of our technology development. Innovating is in our DNA, and we always strive to build solutions that ensure reliability of the process performance by improved safety and efficiency targets.

Our services operations tap into making maintenance activities safer, and by understanding the needed maintenance of the equipment to prevent any hazards to take place. With help of diagnostics and process data the process maintenance breaks can be well-planned and pre-scheduled to avoid sudden production downtime or safety incidents.

Product safety is always one of the main drivers in all our R&D projects. In 2020, all our R&D projects included product safety and sustainability targets.

Quality

We are constantly developing the quality of our products and services, material efficiency and operational quality.

We have built an HSEQ Management System in order to 

  • inform our customers about our unified processes and procedures
  • show that we are continuously improving the quality of our products and activities, as well as the HSEQ activities
  • build a solid foundation for efficient integration and growth 
  • ensure consistent and up-to-date communications with all our stakeholders

We are all responsible for quality.

HSE targets

All our efforts in health and safety aim to ensure a safe working environment for all Neles employees. We believe that every accident can be prevented. Our mid-term target in occupational safety is to achieve an LTIF of less than one by the end of 2021. LTIF reflects the number of incidents resulting in an absence of at least one workday per million hours worked. Our long-term target is zero work-related accidents.

Developing our environmental efficiency is a continuous process. The goal of our environmental targets is to improve energy efficiency of our own operations and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by 2030. Understanding how we manage, use and dispose of water, waste and wastewater globally is a basic premise. We have set unit-specific targets to decrease the water usage of our own operations by 20 percent by 2030. Our target is to reduce the share of landfill waste from total waste by 30 percent by 2030. We also aim at zero environmental incidents.

HSE Policy

Neles’ HSE Policy forms the cornerstones of our HSE work. Our HSE policy states that compliance with applicable laws and regulations is only a minimum requirement and that we strive for performance above and beyond the rules and regulations in our operations. Neles’ HSE Policy supports the development of a safe, healthy and well-managed work environment, and requires all of us to adopt good HSE behavior and follow agreed rules and instructions in all our daily activities. The policy also states our commitment to design sustainable solutions, products, innovations and services to help our customers improve their safety and environmental performance. 

HSE reporting and auditing

Neles uses an HSE reporting tool to track all HSE incidents and other HSE performance factors. The system enables uniform reporting throughout Neles, and it allows us to effectively share information and learn from other locations.

We use an internal global audit program to ensure that our locations follow the health, safety and environment rules and instructions set by Neles and local laws. We concentrate on finding hidden hazards in our local work practices and we track good practices. Corrective actions are to be made within a certain timeline, depending on the severity of the finding.

The HSE target at the individual level is two risk observations per employee and four safety conversations per manager.

Large certification coverage

As part of our sustainability management, we comply with several international standards, such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 50001. Our Helsinki and Horgau sites comply also with ISO 50001 standards covering 32% of our operations.

70% of all our operations are covered by ISO 14001 certification, 70% have ISO 45001 certification, 99% have ISO 9001 certification. The coverage is calculated by the number of employees working in certified facilities. We have also received global multi-site certification for our HSEQ Management System by complying with these standards.

We also have Product Safety related certificates, e.g.: API-6D for ball valves (Mumbai), APIQ1 (Helsinki), TR CU 010, TR CU 032 cat 1&2, TR CU 020 and PED. 

Global list of certified units

Insights on sustainability

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