We have been working hard to give EHS issues a high priority
in the way we do business in Smiths. Our improved performance
derives from integrating EHS responsibilities into our day-to-day
management activities. Our businesses, large and small across
our worldwide operations, drive forward our programme of continual
improvement.
Looking forward, our priorities for EHS are to:
- Achieve ISO 14001 certification for the remaining three of
our 80 targeted major manufacturing sites and continue roll
out among new Group acquisitions.
- Continue to roll out our comprehensive health and safety
audit system.
- Continue to improve the quality and interpretation of our
data, recognising that the diverse and changing nature of our
operations makes it difficult to establish meaningful trends.
- Improve our eco-efficiency by reducing energy, water, waste
and emissions.
- Reduce the number of accidents, building on the improvements
we have made over the last three years.
- Integrate environmental thinking into the design of new products
to meet higher customer expectations and to comply with changing
regulation.
We continued the programme of stakeholder dialogue that we started
last year to help understand our stakeholders’ expectations.
Feedback from our key stakeholders has led us to review our existing
policies and practices and explore how best to extend them to
cover the risks and opportunities identified.
We have aligned our report structure to the relevant sections
of the 2002 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines from the Global
Reporting Initiative (GRI), as some stakeholders value the use of a
common framework for EHS information.
Our successes have been recognised at a local level, with awards
for our pollution prevention programmes and our safety performance.
External benchmarking - our improved rating in the Business in
the Environment (BiE) survey of the UK’s Top 350 companies
- provides a further measure of our progress.
This report has been independently assured as we promised last
year and describes how we manage EHS in our operations.
We have come a long way in recent years but we are not complacent
and recognise there is still much to do. We value your feedback and welcome any comments you may wish to make as part of our
stakeholder dialogue programme.
Keith Butler-Wheelhouse
February 2004
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