Though there is no U.S. federal requirement for the collection of company-wide process incident information, Responsible Care® companies have long recognized that process incidents are an important indicator of performance.
A process safety incident is an unplanned event or upset arising from the manufacturing process, resulting in product spills, fires, explosions, or injuries. Managing, tracking and reporting process incidents allows Responsible Care companies to benchmark their performance and set goals for continuous improvement. In this way, Responsible Care companies are going beyond government requirements by tracking and reporting process safety incidents, as well as sharing key lessons learned, in a spirit of continuous improvement.
Since 1995, process safety incidents among Responsible Care companies have declined 51 percent.
In 2008, the American Chemistry Council adopted the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) definition of a lagging process safety incident. This CCPS version of process safety incident reporting uses a Severity Rating System that will help discern minor incidents from more severe incidents. One of the differences in this CCPS version of a process safety incident from the prior version is the use of the United Nations Dangerous Goods list for chemicals that will trigger an incident reporting threshold. This list is much larger than the CERCLA table that was used for the prior reporting definition, which will result in a different universe of incidents being reported. The use of the United Nations Dangerous Goods list will better align our industry globally. Optional reporting using the CCPS version began in 2009 and will be mandatory in 2010. In 2010, after two years of data has been gathered mandatory reporting has begun, company specific data will be posted.
