Our number one operational priority remains health, safety and the environment for the 20 million consumers who eat and drink with us every day.
All management and board meetings throughout the Group feature a health and safety update as one of their first agenda items. The Board reviews the Occupational Health & Safety and Food Safety policies annually to ensure that they each continue to reflect our aims and aspirations and to meet with current legislation. Supporting the Board is our internal Health, Safety & Environment Forum, made up of technical specialists from around the Compass globe, responsible for promoting policy, setting standards, measuring compliance and sharing best practice across the Group.
We believe that everyone at Compass has a moral obligation to safeguard each other, our customers and the environment by operating a safe, injury free and healthy workplace, serving food that is always safe to eat, nutritional and which minimises our impact on the environment. To ensure best practice, we developed a set of policies, minimum operating standards and behaviours in 2007, which have been steadily rolled out across our business. We are pleased to report that this year the first phase of the programme has been successfully implemented across 95% of our countries. Our standards are based on the strictest regulatory requirements and industry best practice. Indeed, world-class performance continues to be our aim, seeking over the short- to medium-term to set the benchmark for our industry.
This year, in line with our published 2008 commitment, we have worked hard with our internal stakeholders to measure, collate and report on our Lost Time Injury Rate (‘LTIR’) in a consistent way across all of our countries. This data forms the baseline from which to benchmark our 2009-2010 performance and we will update stakeholders on our progress in our 2010 CR Report.
Environment
A key driver towards our success is the degree of autonomy which is afforded to local management teams, allowing them to serve local markets in the most appropriate manner. To support their activities, we have developed an environmental policy supported by a minimum operating standard and a set of behaviours that are being introduced into all our operations.
2009 represented our second year of implementation of a web-based reporting tool to track and report globally in a consistent manner, on our greenhouse gas emissions in our ‘Top Ten’ countries. Overall, we are delighted to report an improvement in our environmental performance this year and achievement of our 2008-2009 environmental targets. However, whilst our ability to report our performance accurately has improved, this continues to be a challenging data collection exercise for us and we still have more work to do in terms of improving the quality of data provided by our suppliers, particularly in the area of waste. This year, we will continue to work with our ‘Top Ten’ countries to optimise the quality of information available, to enable us to report our progress.
In the majority of our locations where we are not directly responsible for the procurement of utilities, equipment, fuel etc, we are working closely with our clients to consider how best to improve the environmental performance of our operations. Initiatives to support this activity include the launch of Environmental Handbooks for unit and office based employees and another for employees responsible for support services, featuring practical steps that employees can take to reduce their impact on the environment.
Policy
Our aim is to set industry leading standards that set the benchmark on performance regarding occupational health and safety, food safety and the environment, providing our customers with the assurance that we are constantly striving to achieve the highest possible standards.
View our global policies