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Glencore commits to migrating first world safety to third world countries

Ivan Glasenberg

Photo by Duane Daws

47% safety improvement in five years

4th March 2015

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Diversified major Glencore, which reported 16 fatalities last year, has committed itself to migrating first-world safety practices into challenging geographies where more than 80% of the deaths took place.

The London-, Hong Kong- and Johannesburg-listed company’s SafeWork programme – in which 118 000 workers took part in 2014 – is currently being implemented in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia, Bolivia and Kazakhstan, where 13 of this year’s fatalities took place.

“It is with great sadness that we report 16 fatalities,” said Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg, who devoted considerable time to safety, governance and sustainability issues during this week’s analyst and media conferences in which Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online took part.

Two of the 16 people died in South Africa, where Glencore employs 40 000 people.

In response to questions put by Hermes Equity Ownership Services’ Bruce Duguid, Glasenberg expressed a strong determination to fix the company’s safety problems in the DRC, Zambia, Bolivia and Kazakhstan, where the company employs 60 000 people at a relatively small number of operations, compared with 140 000 in less challenging geographies, where three fatalities were suffered.

Glasenberg made the point that the company was thus right up with the best in its operations in the more developed geographies but badly down in the four less developed countries in question, where the training being given was identical but which lacked a safety culture.

The company had already become the safety leader in Kazakhstan, where it was sharing its safety programme with the rest of the industry.

Withdrawing from countries that lacked a safety culture would serve no purpose and the company was instead determined to go all out to improve safety.

“How long it’s going to take, I can’t say but we’re not going to give up and I believe we’ll get there,” commented Glasenberg, who was quizzed further by Duguid on the company becoming a member of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), which Glasenberg said had involved the company in critical acceptance analyses and site visits by independent arbitrators.

“So, yes, we’re well accepted by ICMM,” he said, adding that the mining industry needed to convey to the world what it was achieving in terms of health, safety and disease eradication.

The company’s Mopani Copper in Zambia had also won an important award for Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative reporting and transparency during the year and was also involved in the World Economic Forum’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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