Protecting Our People

Protecting the health and safety of our people is a top business priority. Glatfelter is committed to the prevention of injury and ill health for all people at all facilities. We strive to provide workplaces that meet this commitment. In order to ensure our success in this endeavor, we involve employees at every level of our organization in all aspects of our safety, health and wellness programs.

The Glatfelter Global Safety Improvement Initiative, launched at the beginning of 2008, was created to transform Glatfelter’s Health & Safety programs into truly world-class Health and Safety Management Systems that facilitate continuous improvement. Our new Global Health and Safety Policy is fully aligned with Glatfelter core values and supports our vision to become the global supplier of choice in Specialty Papers and Engineered Products.

• Developed and communicated a corporate-wide safety metric system that enables consistent up-to-minute performance communication.
• Developed our safety mission to become: Injury Free Every Day! Provided various skill-building and culture-changing efforts that included specialized training, lockout/tagout improvements, awareness reinforcement, and an increased focus on outage safety performance.
• Increased visibility of our safety mission, policy, initiatives, and performance by placing safety information boards throughout our operations and implementing safety score cards to help employees understand, monitor and be accountable to safety performance.
• Developed and completed gap analysis and gap closure plans based on our management system guidelines. Facility gap closure plans have included thorough process reviews such as compliance audits, personal protective equipment (PPE) assessments, improved safety training processes, and revisions to various safety policies in an effort to match our management system guidelines.

Glatfelter achieved safety performance improvements globally as a result of our global safety initiatives and facility specific efforts. Some business-specific highlights follow:

Composite Fibers Business Unit (CFBU) Safety Awareness Refocus

In 2009, CFBU started a program of Safety Awareness Days (SAE) to raise health and safety awareness for Glatfelter PEOPLE both at work and at home. The events were spread over a period of three-weeks to accommodate all shifts and include all locations within CFBU: Gernsbach, Scaer, Lydney, Caerphilly and the Philippines.

The SAE program emphasizes working safely and acting responsibly both individually and with colleagues, family and friends. The activities for SAE days included:

• Presenting information on the Company’s commitment and expectations for all Glatfelter PEOPLE to improve safety within the organization.
• Providing educational sessions covering the correct procedures for handling chemicals and electricity as well as emergency response behavior
• Demonstrating a heart defibrillator
• Introducing a new safety initiative on hand tools

Specialty Papers Business Unit (SPBU) Targets Systems and Skills

The SPBU focused heavily on improved compliance and employee skill-building efforts throughout 2009 all in an effort to improve working conditions, safe work procedures, and personal accountability for safety performance. While both our Ohio and Pennsylvania Operations focused heavily on lockout-tagout system and training process improvements, the Pennsylvania Operation focused heavily on behavioral awareness (SafeStart) and operating area-specific programs in an effort to improve hazard recognition and personal accountability. The Ohio Operation targeted job-specific safety procedure development (Job Hazard Analyses, or JHA’s) and PPE selection and use improvements in an effort to create an environment of “Standard Work.”

Total case incident rates (TCIR) at both our North American and European facilities have decreased from year to year. While rigidly conforming to the OSHA recordkeeping requirements, Glatfelter is able to use this metric to measure performance, and performance improvement, versus others in the industry.