Accountability & Action

At Compass Minerals, we recognize the finite availability of the essential minerals that we provide and are committed to the responsible stewardship of our resources.

 

This approach to doing business is consistent with our Core Values and critical to Compass Minerals becoming the best essential minerals company for our customers, employees and shareholders. In 2015 we produced Taking Care of the Essentials, a data-driven sustainability report that conforms to the Global Reporting Initiative™ G4 framework. We selected the GRI framework because we believe it represents the most widely recognized structure for holistic, data-driven sustainability reporting, and is in keeping with our commitment to transparency and accountability to our stakeholders.

 

Our sustainability commitment drives our business strategies, helps attract top talent, engages employees and drives shareholder value. Our sustainability platform prioritizes the health and safety of people and the environment, and helps us build trust with our valued stakeholders. This year we have published an interim update on key sustainability metrics, available here. The GRI Index is available for download here.

Our sustainability commitment relies on the following principles

  • Operate in a manner that protects the health and safety of our workforce and our communities.

  • Ensure decisions are consistent with a long-term view of sustainability and stewardship.

  • Recognize the finite nature of the minerals we extract and practice and promote their responsible use.

  • Apply and reward innovations that maximize the efficient use of resources and minimize emissions, waste and other impacts.

  • Build strong relationships that enhance our communities.

  • Deliver real economic value to our shareholders and employees through sustainable growth and disciplined capital allocation.

  • Act with integrity in our corporate governance practices and maintain the highest ethical business standards.

  • Support transparency in these efforts through the use of widely recognized reporting standards such as the Global Reporting Initiative™ (GRI) standards.

THIS IS WHAT WE BELIEVE IN
INTEGRITY

We operate in a fair and transparent manner, embracing the highest ethical standards in everything we do.

 

RESPECT

We are committed to creating a diverse, safe and inclusive organization where all are treated with dignity.

 

COLLABORATION

We accomplish more through cooperation and teamwork.

 

VALUE CREATION

We deliver the best possible results for our customers and shareholders in a manner that respects the resources entrusted to us.

 

HIGH PERFORMANCE

We achieve excellence through initiative, accountability and superior results.

 

Compass Minerals & Safety

We understand that to prevent employee and contractor injuries, we must approach safety excellence from many directions at once. 

 

We must set a high standard of risk mitigation, have a robust safety management system, and support a culture of full engagement and personal accountability at all levels of the organization. We’ve developed a three-pronged approach to safety excellence to help us “Get to Zero.”

 

We continuously determine the status of our improvements by assessing both injury incidents, non-injury incidents (e.g. near misses/near hits), and our proactive key performance indicators (KPIs). Our operations and Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) teams meet annually to ensure the best KPIs are being tracked, targets set, and their status reviewed regularly. This process supports our identification of areas of improvement.

 

We believe that this three-pronged approach to safety excellence will help us deliver on our commitment to our employees, contractors, their families, and our customers to be the safest essential minerals company in the world.

We are committed to meeting this objective by

  • Incorporating hazard identification and risk management into every decision, every day. We pause, identify, discuss and plan our work – every time.

  • Working diligently to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks in our operations before an incident occurs. We focus on the possible consequence, not the likelihood.

  • Identifying and responding to incidents that do not involve injuries to the same degree as those that do result in injuries. We focus on potential severity, not actual outcome.

  • Engineering out the risks we identify to the maximum extent possible. We are not satisfied with the lowest level of control; we strive for hazard elimination.

  • Engaging all employees in meeting the objective of zero injuries and incidents. We know that it takes a village and we are a family.

SAFETY:OUR TOP PRIORITY
MOMENTUM & RESULTS

Our goal is to make Compass Minerals the best and safest essential minerals company with zero injuries. Our total case injury rates for the last six years are:

 
SAFETY PERFORMANCE REPORT
  • YEAR
  • INCIDENT RATE*
  • 2009
  • 2.42
  • 2010
  • 2.29
  • 2011
  • 1.63
  • 2012
  • 1.52
  • 2013
  • 2.20
  • 2014
  • 2.62
  • 2015
  • 2.33
  • 2016
  • 3.38
 

*Recordable injuries per 100 workers annually

Safety is a core value that shapes decision making every day, at every level of the organization. Our ultimate goal is zero injuries to our employees and contractors.
Top Nine
  To ensure a high standard of risk mitigation the Compass Minerals team came together in 2013 to identify our top risks. These higher-risk activities are inherent within our industry. While these risk areas may not have a history of high incident occurrence, we recognize that they present potentially high consequence incidents. We are committed to focusing additional attention and resources in these areas.
Robust Environmental Health & Safety
  Also in 2013, we introduced a more robust safety management system to ensure that our Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) systems continue to develop and that the process improvements are sustained.
Hearts and Minds
  We’re now launching the use of the Energy Institute Hearts & Minds toolkit for improving key elements of safety excellence, such as managing change, front line supervisor skills, understanding and preventing rule breaking, and driving safely, to name just a few.