Environmental, Health, and Safety Risks in Everyday Life
Along with every aspect of human activity comes some risk of adverse environmental, health and safety (EH&S) impacts. On a personal level, we make thousands of decisions each day that involve some weighing of these risks against the benefits we expect to receive.
For example, many people choose to drive a car to work, even though doing so poses some risk not only to our own health and safety, but also to that of others — passengers, occupants of other vehicles, pedestrians — as well as to the environment from vehicle emissions. We drive to work because we have informally weighed these risks against the benefits and against the risks and benefits of choosing alternative modes of transportation.
Likewise, business leaders face daily decisions which involve risk/benefit evaluations. Many of these are of an EH&S nature. Such decisions range from the very simple, low risk/high benefit decisions to those which are much more complex and intricate, involving multiple uncertainties.
Evaluating EH&S Risks at Dow
Dow and its employees have always taken very seriously their obligation to evaluate EH&S risks and weigh them against anticipated benefits when making business decisions. This commitment is outlined in Dow’s EH&S Policy, and is specified in numerous Dow EH&S standards and requirements. In fact, the vast majority of EH&S risks are managed by establishing and then complying with various Dow and governmental standards and requirements.
Dow’s Business EH&S Risk Review Work Process has been designed to meet, among other obligations, various management practices of the American Chemistry Council’s Responsible Care® program. It also helps Dow to meet requirements of the Responsible Care codes of chemical industry associations in countries outside of the U.S.
The process follows this general framework:
Product Safety Assessment and Management Framework
- Recognize that there is a product or activity that potentially poses a risk to people or the environment and it is a candidate for safety evaluation. The product or activity may be:
- New product
- New distribution channel
- Sales into new use
- Sales into new market
- Change in product quality
- New production process
- New additives
- New health or safety information
- Changes in government requirements
- Gather known information, including available hazard and exposure information, to support a safety characterization.
- Evaluate the degree to which the product or activity may pose a concern to the public.
- Evaluate the adequacy of existing actions to manage the risk and, if necessary, identify and implement new risk management options.
- Review progress periodically or implement a feedback loop to initiate additional reviews whenever new information or opportunities become available.
