At BOC we aim to ensure there is no harm to people or the environment due to our operations, or through the use of our products or services. We also are committed to meeting our customers' needs through excellence in all of our products and services with the cornerstone of this being our Quality Management System.
While our safety and environmental performance consistently achieves best-in-class levels, we are constantly working to improve still further. Continuous improvement is a key priority in all our efforts.
We manage safety and environment alongside our health, quality, product stewardship and security programmes. Yet while our Safety, Health Environment and Quality (SHEQ) function has oversight of all these activities, accountability and responsibility for performance sits squarely within the various operating and commercial arms of the organisation - and every person in the organisation.
Our programmes are comprehensive, being designed to ensure the effective management of issues as diverse as the control of major hazards on large plants, reducing the carbon footprint of our products and services, preventing injuries from manual handling or slips, trips and falls, through to defensive driver training in our 1000+ vehicle fleet.
In general terms, we manage SHEQ through four main areas of activity:
We do all this with the vital involvement of key stakeholders including government agencies and non-government organisations - and most importantly the ongoing support of our customers and the communities within which we operate.
SHEQ performance can be measured in many different ways. A commonly used safety measure is the number of injuries resulting in a person not able to attend work for at least one shift following the incident.
Safety underpins everything we do at BOC. While our products are used in virtually every industry and market sector quite safely every day of the year, they must be used correctly. That also goes for their manufacture and distribution.
Product stewardship
Product Stewardship is concerned with all safety, health, environmental and quality aspects of products throughout their life cycle from supply (including manufacture or import), its use, and ultimately through to disposal.
There are two main pieces of legislation designed to ensure safe use of a wide variety of substances and products will have a significant influence on our own products and services.
The first of these is REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation of Chemicals) which will require most products to be registered with the European Chemicals Agency as well as changes to the layout and content of Safety Data Sheets.
The other is the Classification, Labelling and Packaging Regulations which requires all substances to be reclassified and relabelled to align with the GHS (Global Harmonised System for the Classification and Labelling of Substances) requirements.
As these two pieces of legislation overlap and require both new labels and data sheets, the opportunity has been taken to introduce a new safety data sheet (SDS) system to account for these required changes.
The new SDS system will follow industry best practice and will provide a common SDS, generated from a common platform for The Linde Group.
Security
Safety and security are two sides of the same coin.
Security management within BOC extends well beyond the traditional area of site security to personnel, information and supply chain security.
The first three areas are well covered in the organisation with robust rules and standards in place so that within our working environments our people feel safe to work and the information we produce is protected.
Emergency preparedness and business continuity are also vitally important for all our stakeholders, including our employees, our customers and the communities within which we operate. We work closely with relevant government agencies (e.g. HSE for COMAH sites, and national security agencies for threat management) and in accordance with particular government guidelines for specific topics, e.g. pandemic planning including swine influenza.
BOC recognises that good health is necessary for good business and therefore several health and wellbeing programmes are provided for staff. These underpin our commitment to prevent harm and to protect and maintain the health of employees.
As part of our efforts to ensure the health and wellbeing of all our staff, we:
BOC's Environmental Vision is clear - We aim to do no harm to the environment.
Maintaining high levels of environmental performance and reporting are the responsibility of all functions within BOC. In addition, each BOC employee is asked to keep a watch on our actual or potential impact on the environment.
How BOC manages environmental performance
In striving for sound environmental management BOC will:
Climate change
BOC is also active in many other areas of the climate change agenda, and is keen to continue working with our customers and suppliers in this important area.
As the leading supplier of industrial, food, medical and special gases in the UK, as well as associated equipment and services, we aim to ensure the highest levels of quality in everything we do.
BOC aims to continuously improve the quality of its products, services and customer experience. At the same time we strive to maintain a high level of safety and environmental protection.
For these reasons we have introduced an Integrated Management System covering all elements of Quality, Safety, Health and Environmental processes and procedures in order to provide effective and efficient control of all our business activities. As part of a global group of companies, the same systems are in use throughout the Linde Gas Group worldwide, and their deployment helps us to achieve our SHEQ policy.
The Integrated Management System has been developed to ensure compliance with all legal, contracted and elected SHEQ management system elements including the Quality Management System standard ISO9001:2015.
BOC's Quality Management System is audited by Bureau Veritas allowing us to confirm the robustness of our systems. A multi-site certificate against the ISO 9001 standard covers our gas manufacturing, packaging and distribution activities as well as our front line Customer Service Centres.
Gases used in the food industry for consumption (e.g. beverage carbonation), packaging (e.g. bread/meat etc) and ripening (e.g. controlled atmospheres for fruit and vegetables) have to be approved under EU law and are given E numbers. The EU also sets minimum purity criteria. All of these requirements (and more from other organisations) are contained within the Integrated Management System.
To ensure that where medical gases are manufactured and supplied for patient use, the principles of Good manufacturing Practice (GMP) specified in the EC Directive 2003/94/EC laying down the Principles and Guidelines of Good Manufacturing Practice for Human Medicines have also been incorporated into the Integrated Management System.
Our Special Products range of gases includes those used for high purity, instrumentation and calibration applications which require certificates of analysis. We also provide a range of products accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) to ISO 17025 'General Requirements for the Competence of Testing and Calibration Laboratories'.