Safety: Our Highest Value

At Koppers, our goal is to send all employees home as healthy as they were when they arrived for work. The company maintains several ongoing and evolving safety improvement programs designed to achieve this objective. Over the last several years, Koppers employees have been able to significantly improve the company’s safety performance.

• The combination of cases with days away and job restrictions was down 8 percent from 2001.
• Koppers experienced a 5 percent improvement in medical treatment cases and a 4 percent reduction in total cases, from 2001.
• In 2002, the DART (Days Away Restricted/Transferred) rate was 2.6 cases per 200,000 hours, compared to a 2.7 DART in 2001.
• Koppers global operations achieved a TR (Total Recordable) rate of 5.1 per 200,000 hours in 2002, identical to the 2001 TR.
• 28 operating locations completed 2002 without a lost work case.
• Since 1996, total OSHA recordables are down 63%.
• The OSHA recordable case count was down 3.7% from 2001.

Safety Awareness Program
A new Safety Awareness training program delivered to all U.S. facilities encouraged employees to be responsible for their own safety, and that of their coworkers, making it their chief concern every hour of every day. All U.S. plant employees attended an eight-hour safety awareness seminar designed to energize employee attitudes and create a culture that promotes a safe working environment.

An SH&E Observations and Contacts Program was initiated to incorporate behavioral elements into the process. The objective is to deliver a safety message to every employee or conduct a discussion of safe behaviors on the job, once every week. Each month, supervisors must conduct SH&E observations of every employee in an effort to catch a fellow employee working safely—or interrupt them to stop an at-risk behavior. This program is designed to keep safety top-of-mind for everyone at all times.