Environmental Health and Safety
Georgia-Pacific's environmental commitment begins with 10,000% compliance -- 100% of our facilities complying with environmental regulations 100% of the time. The foundation of Georgia-Pacific's environmental commitment is found in the company's comprehensive Environmental, Health and Safety policy, and we use an environmental risk management system to help us meet our commitment.
"Our facilities have to comply with dozens of local, state and federal environmental regulations," says Traylor Champion, vice president -- environmental affairs. "By applying a risk management system, we are better able to assess potential risks and take the appropriate steps to manage them, or even change what we're doing, so we stay in compliance.
"Ultimately, we want to do more. Our environmental vision sets a course for us to engage all employees to help identify and manage our environmental risks and minimize our environmental impacts so we can go beyond compliance."
A key part of the risk management process is reporting and tracking all environmental incidents, even if they don't qualify as a 'reportable incident' under a facility's permit. A team of employees then examines the root causes of the incident and develops an action plan to prevent it from happening again -- at that location or at other facilities across the company.
Equipment reliability is also important. Making sure that all environmental control equipment is in dependable operating condition -- working right all the time -- helps Georgia-Pacific manage environmental risk and ultimately prevent incidents.
"We work every day to try to minimize our environmental impacts. We know that's important to our employees and to our communities," notes Champion. "Our goal is to get to zero incidents. We're not there yet, but we believe we have the right strategy, tools and employee commitment to get there."
