Safety

High safety standards are essential for all our products and at all our sites across the world. We are constantly improving our safety standards through a range of measures.

The Linde Gas division, for example, has set itself the objective of reducing the accident rate annually by 10 percent until it reaches zero, an initiative which is already showing signs of success. During the year, the accident rate worldwide fell to 5.5 accidents per million hours worked. Local companies with higher than average numbers of accidents are required to introduce specific safety schemes to improve their results.

To heighten the sensitivity of local management and employees to safety issues on our sites, Linde Gas again conferred awards in 2004 on business units with particularly low numbers of accidents. Awards were presented, for example, to Linde Gas Polska in Poland and INO Therapeutics Inc. in the United States, as well as to our factory in San Martin in Argentina, which achieved the best results in the world with more than 530,000 accident-free hours worked.

Under our Group-wide Six Sigma (Glossary) program, we also launched various projects during the year to improve safety at work. Our target for Linde Gas Germany, for example, is to halve the average number of industrial accidents in the next two years.

Moreover, from 2004, Linde Gas has been able to offer its customers Liprotect™, a safety program for dealing with industrial gases. The most important elements of Liprotect™ are on-site training and checks, with customers being able to design a safety package from a set of modules to meet their own particular requirements.

During the construction of the natural gas liquefaction plant near Hammerfest, Linde Engineering has been exploring new areas of safety and has developed a special program for protection against fire and explosions. This includes 3-D computer-based simulations of explosion scenarios.

As each plant built by Linde Engineering differs from others in terms of safety details, we offer our customers tailor-made safety solutions and risk analyses designed to meet their specific requirements. Our on-site experts monitor each phase of construction, guaranteeing the highest levels of safety during the entire project.

In the Linde Material Handling business segment, it was possible to maintain the same low level of accidents as in previous years, despite significant increases in output, by continuing to develop the integrated management system for occupational safety, hygiene and environmental protection (ArGUS).