BAT Nigeria - Environment, health and safety
British American Tobacco’s integrated Environmental, Health and Safety policy puts a responsibility on all BAT operating companies and their employees to take reasonable care of themselves and others while at work and to understand the potential impacts our business has on the environment and work to minimise these
Our comprehensive Environment, Health & Safety (EH&S) management system has been in place for many years and is based on international standards, including ISO 14001 (environmental management) and OHSAS 18001 (occupational health and safety). We however follow a four-step approach to achieve continuous improvement in EH&S – ‘Plan’, ‘Do’, ‘Check’, ‘Act’, so that EH&S is an integral part of good management generally.
EH&S Strategic Objective
- To maintain a position at the forefront of business, actively minimising their environmental impacts and maintaining safe and healthy working environments.
- To develop an EH&S policy, governance and sustainability framework that ensures that BAT Nigeria and other markets have EH&S arrangements for the effective planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review/audit of preventive and protective measures, and are aligned with the complexity of our activities and working environment, so that we consistently perform to high standards of EH&S.
Environmental issues, Health & Safety are high priorities for responsible companies – and we have demonstrated this by engaging the services of relevant organizations to impart additional knowledge on environment, health and safety measures to all our employees.
Every year we aim to improve our Environment, Health & Safety (EH&S) performance, systems, programmes, data-gathering and target-setting, and develop new ways of reporting on progress.
Our environmental management systems conform to international standards such as ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001. In safety management, we put several programs and communications to drive towards a zero target for accidents across our operations.
The ‘Closing the gap to ZERO’ objective started in 2013 with a focus on top accident categories. It has three strands we work towards: STOP - entrapments and falls from heights, AVOID - slips, trips and manual handling, MITIGATE - vehicle related, attack or assault.
Our Target is Zero accident(s) in all area of our operations.
This Zero accident target is achieved through:
- Proper machine guarding,
- Use of personal protective equipment where necessary,
- Regular training on the use and operating principles of all plants and equipment,
- Employment of the best technical staff to man all our operations
We are also strongly committed to the conservation of the environment and the sustainability of natural resources.
Our Occupational Health Management (OHM) Programme ensures that none of our staff is exposed to any of the major cause of occupational health hazards. We seek to proactively prevent work related illness by recognising hazards, assessing the risks and applying appropriate controls. We have an onsite clinic that provide health services for factory workers in our Ibadan factory.
We have comprehensive medical service for all our staff and their immediate family across West and Central Africa Area. We also provide workplace health education programme basically to serve as a means of teaching our staff on how to protect themselves from contracting major diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, COVID-19 and many other diseases..