• Home
• Responsibility
• CR Report 2004
• Caring for the environment
• EHS management
• Letter from the Vice President, EHS

Letter from the Vice President, EHS

This year, for the first time, GSK’s Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) report is fully integrated into the company’s Corporate Responsibility Report on GSK.com.

We cover the same issues in the same detail as before, but have made it simpler to understand our overall approach to corporate responsibility and to see the connections between the many subject areas covered.

Consultation with stakeholders has helped us identify the prime sustainability challenges we face. These are: climate change, the impact of pharmaceuticals in the environment, and more sustainable materials consumption. We have begun work developing strategies to tackle these issues and will publish our plans in 2006.

We have developed a rigorous approach to EHS and sustainability, with a long-term ‘Plan for Excellence’ and five-year improvement targets applying throughout our operations. The first five-year phase of the programme will be complete in 2005 so we will set new five-year targets during this year to help drive the business towards sustainability. From the end of 2005 we will expand traditional EHS programmes to include a focus on sustainability.

We have continued to make progress - for example, in 2004 four additional sites were certified to the EHS management system standards ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001.

We are on track to meet seven of our ten quantified environmental targets by the end of 2005. The targets cover some of our most important issues, including energy and water consumption, ozone depleting potential, global warming potential, volatile organic compound emissions, wastewater quality and waste.

We may not achieve the three targets on hazardous waste, recycling and ozone depletion potential of ancillary equipment by the end of 2005. A fuller explanation of our performance is provided on the relevant pages of this report.

Our long-term plan for excellence charts a journey which begins with improving our systems, progresses to leadership in EHS performance, and ultimately brings us closer towards sustainability. The 10-year programme envisages continuous improvement as well as identifying specific actions. As good EHS management and performance are achieved we will set ourselves more challenging sustainability objectives on materials efficiency, energy efficiency and use of renewable resources. We also need to look more closely at the inter-relations between the social, economic and environmental impacts of our business.

I hope that this report meets your needs as a stakeholder and I welcome your comments or suggestions.

James Hagan Ph.D., P.E.
Vice President, Corporate Environment, Health and Safety

Back to top