Employee and Contractor Safety
Striving for Zero Harm
The health and safety of our employees and contractors is a fundamental tenet of our business. We continually strive for Zero Harm, which includes an ongoing safety awareness campaign underpinned by posters, safety topics and training, as well as stringent housekeeping campaigns.
Determined not to rest on our laurels, we plan to further strengthen our safety performance by addressing issues identified in our 2017 safety audits (e.g. hot work, excavation safety, rigging and slinging, and electrical safety). We have introduced dedicated managers to oversee on-site contractors at our operations and enhanced our integrated Safety, Health and Sustainability management system by integrating fatal risk protocols into performance management for senior staff.
Metalkol RTR – a blueprint for safety milestones
Tailings reclamation operations typically feature higher levels of inherent safety risk during their construction phase. Therefore, we are particularly proud that for 2018 our Metalkol RTR project in the DRC reached a significant safety milestone of 10 million Lost Time Injury (LTI)-free hours. From the outset, the Metalkol RTR project has been supported by safety systems and procedures developed specifically for ERG Africa. Critical tasks and associated procedures were identified and developed into training programmes, which all employees and contractors undertook based on their specific areas of work. The process of embedding the safety standards did not happen overnight - staff had to overcome cultural differences and language barriers. Four different native languages are spoken on site: Swahili, French, Chinese and English.