Scope
This Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) web site is designed
to give a complete picture of our EHS issues and impacts and how
we manage them. To do so, it includes detailed information about
our emissions and injury and illness performance as well as details
about the programmes we have in place to address EHS issues and
how we continuously improve them. Our programmes have a structure
that we call the Framework and we have a long term EHS
Plan for Excellence that guides us in the longer term.
Since our programmes are designed to stand the test of time, some
pages of the web site have dates indicating when certain information
is effective. Our EHS policy and Global EHS Standards are two examples.
The EHS Policy was approved in 2001
and has been effective as written since then and the Global
EHS Standards supporting the Policy were approved and effective
January 1, 2002. While we review our Policy and Standards regularly,
they were written to be effective over the long term to provide stability
for our programmes and it has not been necessary to change them since
they were approved.
On the EHS web site we include data on the environmental impacts
of all 27 of our pharmaceutical and consumer research & development
sites and all 97 of the manufacturing locations that were part of
the network in 2003. Rationalisation of the manufacturing network
continues resulting in a diminishing number of operations. These
two groups of sites represent the majority of our environmental impact
and we do not collect environmental data from most commercial locations.
The occupational health and safety data cover the same manufacturing
and research & development sites but also cover major offices and
all except thirteen of the 85 office, sales and distribution locations.
The commercial sites that do not report are mainly small offices
that manage sales employees who work out of their vehicles and homes.
Our new Commercial Support team is working with our office and sales
locations to develop contacts, implement health and safety programmes
and improve reporting.
One of the prime audiences for this report is our shareholders and others such as financial analysts who may want to consider our EHS programmes and performance in their decisions about investing in GlaxoSmithKline. Non-governmental organisations may also want information about our environment, health and safety programmes and progress to inform their advocacy decisions. Another important audience is our own management and employees. This web site serves as the definitive source for company-wide EHS information that has been verified and can be used both inside and outside the company.
The web site is designed to help our stakeholders find the information they need. Some will want to know how we manage our programmes so we include our Policy and Standards, originally approved in 2001, and other information about our Framework. Other audiences will be more interested in our quantitative performance according to specific targets as well as the quantities of our emissions. Still others may want to know about specific programmes and accomplishments. We have tried to include enough information to satisfy all of these stakeholders and arranged it with sufficient links to enable them to find just the information they want. There is also an index with links listed in the navigation.
In addition to information about performance of our own manufacturing
network, we are working to include information about our contract
manufacturers because they represent an extension of our own manufacturing
capability. We focused on manufacturers of our primary active ingredients
because they represent the most significant contributors to our emissions
profile. This information, about seven of our contract manufacturers,
is reported separately from information about GlaxoSmithKline sites.
Data on the web site are reviewed and verified first by an internal group.
The report based on the web site is then independently verified by
ERM. The internal review panel collects data from all operations
and collates it to provide the company-wide summary. Many reported
parameters have multiple components. Energy from non-transport sources,
for example, has seven components - electricity, steam and
five fuels. Each of these components is compared to data from the
previous year and significant changes are reviewed with the reporting
entities. Each year we take this opportunity to refine and improve
the data accuracy and calculations of the EHS impacts. The internal
review sometimes identifies errors in site reporting, calculation
factors and other sources. When errors are uncovered, we correct
the previously reported parameters and identify these corrections
in the reports. Most of these changes are not large but we report
them so that our readers can revise their assessments based on true
improvements or lack of improvements from our baseline year.
Throughout the report are references to the specific areas of the
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Guidelines that are addressed.
In addition, there is a Global Reporting Initiative Content Index listing all of the GRI indicators in Part C of the reporting
guidelines. The Content Index includes explanations as to the extent
of our reporting for each indicator and links to relevant sections
of the web site.
This web site is prepared by the Corporate Environment, Health
and Safety (CEHS) department at GlaxoSmithKline by Nancy English,
PhD, RPh, Director, EHS Reporting. There were many contributions
to the report from CEHS staff members as well as from the Corporate
Employee Health Management department. You are looking at the section
of the EHS web site that covers the calendar year 2003. The 2002
web site can be found here
or the 2002 PDF is available in the list
of GSK documents.
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