Petrochemicals producers around the world are adopting the responsible care initiative. In the Middle East, the GPCA is leading the drive to increase the awareness of regional producers of its benefits.
Growing concerns about the negative impacts of petrochemicals and refining industries on the environment and the community in general have led industry players to adopt initiatives to operate safely, profitably and with due care for future generations. They call it The Responsible Care Initiative.
“Responsible Care is the global chemical industry’s environmental, health and safety (EHS) initiative to drive continuous improvement in performance.
It achieves this objective by meeting and going beyond legislative and regulatory compliance, and by adopting cooperative and voluntary initiatives with government and other stakeholders,” says Dr. Peter Cartwright, chair of the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA) responsible care leadership group and vice president and executive director of environmental, health and safety at Dow Corning.
“Responsible Care is an ethic and a commitment that seeks to build confidence and trust in an industry that is essential to improving living standards and the quality of life,” adds Bernhard Thier, manager responsible care and ICCA communications.
Responsible care focuses on new and important challenges facing the petrochemical industry and global society, including the growing public dialogue over sustainable development, public health issues related to the use of chemical products, the need for greater industry transparency, and the opportunity to achieve greater harmonization and consistency among the national Responsible Care programmes currently implemented.
Originally conceived in 1984 by the Canadian Chemical Producers Association, the initiative was brought to the United States by American Chemistry Council (ACC) in 1988.
“Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association (GPCA) adopted the Responsible Care initiative in 2009 thereby bringing this important initiative to the Gulf and Middle East region,” says Tahir Jamal Qadir, director responsible care at the Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association (GPCA).
Responsible Care commits companies and national associations to work together to continuously improve the environmental, health and safety knowledge and performance of their technologies, processes and products over their life cycles so as to avoid harm to people and the environment.
“Use resources efficiently and minimise waste, and to report openly on performance, achievements and shortcomings,” says Thier. “Along with listening, engage and work with people to understand and address their concerns and expectations,” he adds.
It also aims to cooperate with governments and organisations in the development and implementation of effective regulations and standards, and to meet or go beyond them.
“GPCA plans to play a key role in the region by collaborating with the national governments and international agencies and associations like UNEP, UNDP, ICCA etc. Our strategy is to implement global initiatives in a manner which is consistent with our regional requirements,” says Qadir.
“It also provides help and advice to foster the responsible management of chemicals by all those who manage and use them along the product chain,” he adds.
Responsible Care has evolved as a global initiative over two decades. As a result, there are differing requirements for Responsible Care participation and performance within national associations.
“Companies do not have to do anything to adopt it except for joining GPCA,” says Qadir.
“One of the pre-condition of joining GPCA is to adopt the Responsible Care by signing the support letter. Once they join, GPCA will closely work with the company to come up with a plan to implement Responsible Care. Moreover, GPCA will provide guidance for the implementation of Responsible Care in a manner that will be least demanding on the Company’s resources,” he adds.
To help regional industry associations adopting the initiative, ICCA has introduced Responsible Care Global Charter which dictated what should be done. “The Charter establishes a framework for company and association activities in the future, and defines specific commitments consistent with the fundamental features. The effort recognizes that the timetable for implementation will vary country by country,” says Thier.
Implementation of the initiative
Implementing the Responsible Care initiative is not any easy task especially for small and medium size companies. It can also be quite difficult for the large ones as well.
“It is not easy for companies to adopt and implement such major initiatives on their own,” says Albert Biggs, general manager of Operational Excellence for Sipchem.
“Working together on responsible care initiative through a trade association such as GPCA adds immediate value to member companies,” he explains.
Though all companies across the region showed commitment toward the implementation of the responsible care initiative through their operation process, some companies have reached advanced stages in deploying it by introducing the latest technologies or enhancing the performance of existing plants.
“MEGlobal has a firm commitment to the principles of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada Responsible Care initiative. But a commitment is only part of the equation; we feature an aggressive improvement programme to reduce energy usage in the manufacture of its products. This includes reduction of consumption of electrical power and fossil fuels,” says Dr. Ramesh Ramachandran, CEO of MEGlobal.
“Since the formation of the company in 2004, overall energy use has been trimmed by over 12%. This is a significant reduction in the size of the company’s environmental footprint, while at the same time lowering manufacturing costs,” he says.
Reducing emissions
One of the key elements for companies behind implementing the Responsible Care initiative is the reduction of the carbon footprint and slashing the emissions to protect the environment and the ozone layer.
“We have several process units that have large furnaces and boilers. When you burn fuel to operate these units you produce combustion gases that contain CO, CO2 and nitrous oxides (NOx) which are known air pollutants,” says Biggs.
“When building new facilities or debottlenecking existing process units we research and use the latest and best available technologies that minimize such pollutants.
While expensive, often it becomes a real win – win situation, by both reducing emission levels and at the same time allowing increased plant production,” explains Biggs.
The benefits from implementing these measurements were doubled for Sipchem says Biggs.
“The benefit we get from implementing this responsible care initiative is for the favour of our people and the environment, the secondary benefit, which is from the cost stand point, for example, we can run our plant now at 125% of its designed rate, whereas before we were limited at 110%.”
As all tasks face challenges, introducing responsible care initiative within the process poses several challenges.
“We always have challenges around mechanical integrity, we have to know what type of maintenance, when to maintain it, when to apply preventive maintenance, and how frequent we use it,” says Biggs.
“Preventive maintenance and predictive monitoring programmes are always a challenges, but we are also using the latest technology and hire skilled people to face these challenges, so for every challenge we have a way, something in place to mitigate the risk,” concludes Biggs.
Benefits
The implementation of Responsible Care within a member company leads to the following benefits:
• The initiative assists companies to comply with environmental, health and safety legislation.
• Diminishes the risks of environmental, health and safety failures.
• Optimizes operational conditions and company performance.
• Improves the image and reputation of your company towards the employees, authorities, customers and general public.
• Demonstrates an ongoing commitment to corporate social responsibility.
Implementing responsible care at SabTank
SabTank is a Service Company dedicated to providing high quality bulk handling, terminal, and material management services for SABIC and non-SABIC affiliates. SabTank has two port terminal operation facilities under its fold. One is King Fahd Industrial Port, KFIP-Jubail, consisting of seven berths serviced by seventy-eight storage tanks, storing thirty-two different chemicals, manufactured by SABIC and non-SABIC affiliates.
The other is KFIP-Yanbu where two berths are supplied with fifteen products out of which five are stored in eleven storage tanks located at the port. In total, SabTank handles forty-seven different chemicals produced by SABIC and non-SABIC affiliates. SabTank has a cumulative storage capacity of more than one million cubic meters and the berth throughput reaches around 30 million tonnee per year.
SabTank was founded in 1996 and has since built a reputation of being a responsive provider of high quality service for port operations, a good employer and a good community member.
SabTank started implementing Responsible Care early in the year 2007 after attending the first GPCA Annual Forum in December 2006. However at that time GPCA had not adopted this initiative. Therefore as such no expertise and guidance was available from GPCA for implementing Responsible Care in SabTank.
SabTank has a well-established and a robust Environmental, Health and Safety management system which has passed through three cycles of external certifications.
Responsible Care implementation was tackled in two phases. Phase I consisted of conducting the gap analysis in order to ascertain the shortfalls within our existing management systems and to develop the action plans to address these shortfalls.
This took almost two months and by the end of February 2007, we knew exactly what to do to implement the Responsible Care in SabTank.
The Responsible Care Initiative was launched by SabTank’s President by signing the Responsible Care Global Charter. Phase II started with implementing the actions necessary to close all the gaps.
During this phase, issues like Community Outreach, Distribution, Product Stewardship, Sustainability were addressed. Community outreach programs were developed under which students from Jubail & Yanbu cities participated in the SHE day as well as in the beach cleaning campaigns.
Community schools were helped to develop effective emergency response programs. They were also provided with Material Safety Data Sheets in a booklet form for the chemicals used in the school laboratories.
At the same time, under the Product Stewardship Program, different entities involved in handling and distribution of chemicals were linked together to communicate the hazards and risks of the chemicals being handled.
The government and civil authorities associated with the emergency response were an essential part of this communication of information.
Through these agencies the communities around the transportation routes were made aware of the hazards and risks and the countermeasures in case of spills of these chemicals while in transportation.
Other programs put in place addressed the issues related with employees’ health & safety, process safety, security and pollution prevention. During the whole process, SabTank developed a complete Security Management System which has since helped SabTank in improving its security operations at its facilities in Jubail and Yanbu.
It is worthwhile to mention that the complete establishment of the Responsible Care initiative was done in-house and no consultants and expertise was used from outside except for the third-party certification.
Even the training programs were developed and implemented by SabTank personnel.
On October 9 2008 SabTank became the first company in the whole region to receive third-party certification on Responsible Care Management System.
SabTank has an integrated management system which caters to the need of Quality (ISO 9001), Environmental (ISO14001), Health & Safety (OHSAS 18001) and Responsible Care (RC14001/RCMS) management systems.
SabTank’s achievement in establishing Responsible Care and thereby becoming a leader in the region, speaks of the leadership qualities of Sabic and SabTank management. The support and the backup provided by these leaders has proved to be vital in implementing this new global initiative in the company for the very first time in the region.
