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Environmental management

Environmental issues are managed together with health and safety through an integrated EHS system that aims to ensure issues and risks are identified, standards are established, training is provided, targets set and audits conducted.

We have a clearly defined EHS management structure. Overall responsibility rests with the Corporate Executive Team and the Board. The Board champion for EHS is JP Garnier, the Chief Executive Officer. Rupert Bondy, General Counsel, is the operational champion of EHS on the corporate executive team. We also have a Corporate Responsibility Committee and Corporate EHS department. See more on our EHS Management Organisation and EHS Management System.

Our EHS Policy, Vision and 64 Global EHS Standards set the overall framework for managing issues. In 2005 we distributed an EHS management toolkit which provides sites with instructions and descriptions of appropriate procedures for managers worldwide.

Our EHS Plan for Excellence, which was developed in 2001, sets out our 10-year strategy for improving our environmental performance. In 2005 we came to the end of the first 5-year period and began revising and extending the Plan to 2015.

Stakeholder engagement plays an important role in how we manage EHS. In 2005 we carried out a special engagement exercise with employees and set up a standing panel of external EHS stakeholders. Feedback from staff and external sources identifies issues and provides insights that help us determine how to move forward.

Our CEO’s EHS Excellence Awards recognise and reward GSK sites that show leadership in EHS. The Awards highlight sites that have demonstrated exceptional commitment, with innovative approaches that provide examples of good practice on EHS management to share with other sites. The winners of our 2005 Excellence Awards demonstrate that many projects which improve environmental performance also save money.

We carry out regular EHS audits of GSK operations, contract manufacturers and key suppliers to assess the extent to which management systems and standards are being implemented to improve performance and achieve compliance.

Environment costs
In 2005, our capital investment in environmental projects was £4.9 million and our operating and maintenance costs were £18.1 million. This expenditure relates to wastewater treatment, waste management and air pollution control.

Compliance
As a minimum we aim to comply with all legal requirements. We regret that in 2005 we were in breach of regulations in these cases:

• a UK consumer healthcare manufacturing site paid a £15,000 fine and £6,650 court costs following a prosecution by the UK Health and Safety Executive for an incident that occurred in 2004 and resulted in amputation of an employee’s finger tip
• a US consumer healthcare manufacturing site paid a $11,063 fine to their state environmental authority for not completing required report of storage of hazardous waste
• a Puerto Rico pharmaceutical manufacturing site paid a $1,600 fine to the US Environmental Protection Agency as a result of failure to fully comply with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
• a US consumer healthcare manufacturing site paid a $1,000 fine to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) related to non-compliance with OSHA eyewash requirements

We also received the following notices of violation which did not result in fines or penalties

• a consumer healthcare manufacturing site in Australia, for exceeding allowable limits for suspended solids in wastewater
• two consumer healthcare manufacturing sites in the US, for exceeding permitted substance levels in wastewater

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