Though most organisations above a certain size now include some workforce safety data in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, there has been little debate about the role that safety specialists can play in improving business and product sustainability and minimising adverse business impacts.

DuPont's vice president of safety and protection Mark Vergnano opened proceedings with the proposition that key trends influencing business attitudes to safety and sustainability were a growing public desire to feel secure from harm, especially in the light of terrorist threats, an expectation of more corporate responsibility and a much greater scepticism about the inherent goodness of big business.

In a panel session, Claus Conzelmann, vice president for safety, health and environment at food group Nestlé, suggested that extending your own organisation's safety competence and standards out into the supply chain was one way to take product stewardship beyond simply environmental impacts. In Nestlé's own case, he gave the example of milk transportation, explaining the group is the world's biggest milk buyer and outsources most of its logistics, especially in the developing world.

"In some of these areas people don't even have driving licences, or if they do, they are bought on the black market," Conzelmann noted. He said the company is now helping provide safe driving programmes in such countries, and seeing a positive impact on road accident figures in its logistics chain.

Jukka Takala, director of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, added the example of the furniture chain Ikea working with Chinese manufacturers to improve the guarding on woodworking machines.

In a break-out session, David Wilkinson, director of environment, health and safety at Alcan Packaging Food Europe, talked delegates through a system that aims to quantify the workplace safety risks associated with any product as part of a "stewardship tool" that profiles the impacts of any piece of Alcan packaging. Products are assessed under economic, environmental and social headings (measured against low-impact benchmark products), with the latter accounting for the health and safety risks associated with making it and the strength of the health and safety system at the relevant plant.

The profile is presented as a table with colour-coded measures so that Alcan can see at a glance which products are associated with safety "hotspots" and its customers can judge their overall sustainability. Wilkinson said this transparency carried the risk that customers wouldn't always like what they saw, but added "if a tool never gave negative answers it wouldn't be worth using it."

Back at the plenary sessions, Jukka Takala lamented workplace safety's staid image, noting it was hard to imagine the Nobel committee awarding the peace prize, recently given to Al Gore for his environmental work, to a safety campaigner.

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Powerful prizes

Energy companies almost swept the board at DuPont's sixth annual safety awards, handed out at the safety and sustainability forum. Utilities won three of the five prizes and an oil producer landed a fourth. The winners were:

• ScottishPower Energy Networks, for its Powerwise project to educate children about risks from electricity distribution plant. The company has reached 129,000 school children in three years through a mixture of primary school visits, resource packs tailored to the national science curriculum and an interactive website. ScottishPower's health and safety development manager, Andrew Sharman, said the project's payback for the company was a decrease in vandalism to its equipment and thefts of copper from substations, which had risen with the escalating price of scrap metal.

   

• E.ON Benelux for a programme called Going for Safety Excellence which has raised standards since 2002 by testing contractors on their safety competence and installing surveillance equipment in enclosed and high-risk areas, plus various safety-awareness initiatives. The chief executive for E.ON's lowlands operation said the proof of the pudding had been in the the fact they had managed two six-month shutdowns of major power plants, with the help of up to 1,500 contractor staff, without a single lost-time accident.

The Swiss Addax Petroleum Corporation won with a programme to protect its staff in West Africa and Kurdistan by engaging with local communities, rather than the traditional response of simply beefing up security. Spanish electricity utility Endesa was rewarded for cutting its accident frequency rate by 40% since 2004 and Portuguese shopping mall operator Sonae Sierra for a behavioural safety scheme designed to help the firm work towards its zero-accident target.