Protect the People

Our ambition is to protect all people in our value chain. Our workforce through a healthy and safe working environment, our customers and end-users with products of the highest quality and by demanding fundamental human and labour rights for the workers in our supply chain.

We are committed to grow our business responsibly and the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees, temporary workers, contractors, and visitors is one of our most important priorities. Providing a safe work environment that supports personal growth and optimises well-being, is part of our culture and is deeply embedded in our values and purpose to make a difference in the food packaging industry.

Safety culture

We want promote a culture of safe behaviour that reaches beyond compliance. We work systematically to prevent work-related injuries and monitor our health and safety performance through systematic safety reporting and thirdparty management certification. In addition to complying with applicable legal requirements and regulations, we comply with prevailing industry standards and the internationally recognised framework for occupational health and safety management ISO 45001. Some of our sites are ISO 45001 certified. The remaining have started to prepare for the certification.

To promote a strong safety culture across our organisation, we have outlined both individual and shared responsibilities for health and safety.

Everyone at Faerch plays an important role in maintaining a safe work environment, spanning from top management to the last person employed. Through active engagement and communication at all levels of the organisation, we seek to promote a strong safety culture.

Integrated Management System

Our health and safety management system aims to support our ambitions, and it contains policies that defines responsibilities and obligations to ensure a systematic approach for protecting the health and safety of our employees and contractors.

The health & safety management system will be included in an integrated management system, which is planned to be implemented. the integrated management system will ensure natural integration of health & safety, quality and environmental ambitions in the daily work.

Leadership commitment

Visible leadership commitment is essential to promoting a strong and positive safety culture. Management at all levels at Faerch is obligated to promote and comply with our policy by:

• Encouraging a workplace culture where employees are committed to and accountable for taking care of themselves and colleagues in a healthy and safe way.

• Ensuring that all our facilities and technical equipment are maintained and meet high safety and appearance standards.

• Continuously developing and implementing risk management to understand risks, eliminate hazards and reduce impact by engaging employees in the planning and execution.

• Encouraging employees to work in a safe and healthy way – and to encourage reporting of unsafe and unhealthy situations and conditions.

• Ensuring that necessary skills and training are available to implement the Health and Safety policy.

• Engaging customers, employees, contractors, suppliers, and other stakeholders through dialogue to meet our health & safety standards.

Employee engagement

Employee engagement is essential to improving our Health & Safety performance. Employees, temporary workers and contractors must be aware of safety risks and committed to taking appropriate action. This requires a culture where people feel safe to raise safety issues and concerns to colleagues.

Improving our safety reporting with Assure

To align our safety reporting across the Group and to remove barriers to reporting, we introduced a new incident reporting system in 2022. The health and safety software Assure provides us with a comprehensive view of health and safety across our organisation by enabling us to report and capture data with ease. The system helps us to report incidents, near misses and unsafe acts without delay, and it encourages employees to think safety into their daily work.

By implementing Assure, we aim to lower the barrier to recording incidents. The system provides our people with simple, intuitive tools for reporting via PC, laptop, or mobile phone. When an incident is recorded through the system, the local organisation is alerted and can assign tasks to the right people. For incidents and near misses, a detailed investigation will be launched, and learnings will be distributed. For a reported hazard, the potential risk is removed, and a risk assessment is made.

Records can be made by everyone entering one of Faerch’s sites, including both internal and external personnel. QR codes are placed in tactical locations in every manufacturing site. Simply scan the QR code, click on the link and you are directed to the portal for reporting an incident, near miss or a hazard observation. To overcome language barriers, the system is developed to handle eight languages.

The system includes a task manager providing a comprehensive overview of all tasks related to reported incidents, near misses and hazards. This allows for quick action and effective follow-assessment and follow-up.

Data captured in the Incident reporting system will be available in the Faerch Group Business Intelligence system for reporting and analysis. Incidents, near misses and hazards are categorised, analysed, and managed by Group Health & Safety to make sure that the right safety process improvements are prioritised to make the working environment at Faerch safer.

PERFORMANCE

Risk assessments

In 2023, we will continue to strengthen the health and safety performance across the Group. We will conduct risk assessments for each individual sites to identify, analyse and control hazards and risks. The risk assessments are essential to preventing potential risks and accidents. The risk assessments will be made in cooperation between the H&S responsible and the employees working on the shopfloor who know the process. This is also a part of the engagement and raising awareness of taking care of your own and your colleagues’ safety.

Safety walks

Another action to come is regular safety walks, where various employees in cooperation with the H&S responsible will go through a planned area to follow up on conditions and behaviour. This will be filled into a template for safety walks. The purpose of the safety walks is to improve awareness of the importance of safety but also to encourage safe behaviour.

Lost Time Injuries

Today, we measure the number of lost time injuries per million working hours (LTIFR). Our target is to continue to decrease this number. In 2022, the LTIFR was 9.4. The acquisition of PACCOR and MCP USA makes historical data incomparable, therefore 2022 serves as our base year. Even though we see a movement in the right direction concerning injuries, we continue to intensify our efforts to drive further improvements. In 2023, our target is to reduce LTIFR to 7.5 reflecting our preventive and systematic approach to safety.

Going forward, we will introduce other KPIs based on data captured in the Incident Reporting system (Assure) to show the maturity of the Health & Safety work on each individual site.

Food safety

Food safety is essential to our business, and consumers should always be confident that the food they buy is safe to consume.

Our aim is to maintain a leading position within rigid food packaging while complying with the strictest food safety requirements. Guaranteeing food safety is our key priority. Without that, our effort to achieve circularity and reduced environmental impacts will have little value.

At Faerch, we therefore continuously develop methods and processes to ensure and validate food safety of our products.

Introduced

Introduced regular meetings in groups between local H&S managers to