The hallmark of the Process Safety Code is the goal of achieving “continual improvement of process safety." To reach this goal, companies must be able to objectively assess their process safety performance. A key question is, What is effective process safety management performance? Ultimately, it is the safe, reliable and environmentally sound operation of chemical facilities as manifested by accident-free experience accumulated over the lifetime of a facility.
At this time there is no technically rigorous method for assessing process safety performance by reliably predicting accident reduction on the basis of current information. The CCPS has embarked on a research program to define measurable process safety attributes and to develop robust methods for assessing a company's performance.
In the meantime, companies will have to rely on classic measures of safety performance such as data on accident rates, lost time injuries, quantities of chemicals released and so forth. But, the goal of continual improvement still remains, and American Chemistry Council members will still be required to perform self-evaluations of their process safety performance.
The self-evaluation is supposed to provide an indication of how well companies are doing at developing and implementing programs directed at satisfying their Process Safety Code commitment. The self-evaluation is not able to focus on the long-term effectiveness of a company's efforts. (That is what the CCPS's efforts are all about.) Rather, it only addresses the issue of compliance with the Management Practices in the Code. Nonetheless, even with this limitation, the self-evaluation is an important feature of the Responsible Care Program. Thus, you must strive for consistency in the manner in which you perform the self-evaluations so that comparison of several evaluations over the years will reveal the continual trend of improvement strived for by successful companies. To aid this effort, American Chemistry Council is planning to hold seminars on the self-evaluation element of the program.
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