Responsible Care Activities
Responsible Care (RC)
Responsible Care is a voluntary initiative on chemicals that was first proposed in Canada in 1985 and has since become a worldwide effort.
Chemicals are all around us and essential to our daily lives. However, if handled improperly, they can have a major impact on the environment, safety, and health.
Many chemical companies are voluntarily implementing RC activities aimed at protecting the environment, health and safety throughout the entire life cycles of products from development to manufacturing, distribution, use, final consumption, disposal and recycling, while publicizing the results of their activities and maintaining dialogue and communication with society.
At Sumitomo Seika, we are committed to ensuring quality, in addition safety, health and the environment, as part of our Responsible Care activities. Each year, we formulate plans for RC activities, ensure that they are put into practice, and evaluate them both voluntarily and through audits, etc., and disclose the results to the public.
Our Initiatives
Policy
We have set “Corporate Policy on Safety, Environment and Quality” with the basic principles of achieving “zero-accident and zero-injury operations”, ensuring “customer satisfaction” and promoting “co-existence and coprosperity with society”, while maintaining the fundamental policy of “prioritizing safety over everything else”.
RC activities, among others, are extremely important issues for our chemical industries in order to continue sustainable development and gain trust and confidence from society. Having been participating in RC activities since 1995, as a member of society, we not only comply with related laws and regulations but also voluntarily work on environment protection, occupational safety, and disaster prevention. Incidentally, to further augment our RC activities and
communicate the activities to society, we signed the Responsible Care Global Charter revised in 2014.
Promotion System
RC activities require large investment decisions at times, in an effort to address such issues as environment protection, occupational safety, and disaster prevention. Therefore, we have established the Responsible Care Committee, chaired by the president, to make appropriate management decisions on the promotion of RC activities. In addition, we have the RC Promotion Committee and the Quality Meeting under the RC Committee to formulate policies and plans and to ensure that the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle is successfully implemented every year.
Organization
Evaluation (RC audit)
Every year, a specialized unit established by the RC Committee, which is chaired by the president, conducts RC audits and quality audits of our plants in Japan and of overseas consolidated subsidiaries to drive continuous improvement in our RC activities in order to continuously implement the PDCA cycle and spiral up. In these audits, we check the status of annual RC action programs, and the results are reported to the Responsible Care Promotion Committee and the Responsible Care Committee, where they are reflected in management reviews.
