With the investments undertaken after the privatization of the company in 2000, Petrol Ofisi A.Ş. has started to work on projects that reflect the great importance it places on Health, Safety and the Protection of the Environment.

The HSE Directorate, established with the privatization, has successfully imposed a culture of HSE on company employees with the training sessions, written instructions, procedures, safety manual, Personal Protection and Waste Control equipment that it has introduced, seeking to keep occupational health and safety risks under control and achieve continuous improvement with inspections geared to boost performance. As a result of these efforts, a decrease has been observed in the numbers of work accidents, fires and environmental accidents.

Our objective and commitments have been set forth in our “Health, Safety and Environmental Safety Policy.” The topics of HSE take priority in our Company policies as we implement our principles of being, before the laws, the community and our stakeholders, a good, visionary, innovative, customer-focused company, sensitive to health, technical safety and the environment, open and transparent, sensitive to and respectful of human beings, participatory and in operation every hour of the day.

Health, Safety and the Environment according to the dictionary definition:

On the basis of these definitions, we can say that Health and Safety means the prevention of accidents and occupational diseases and that the Environment means the protection of natural resources and the management of wastes.
Health, technical safety and the environment refers to the continual development and updating of the entire group of scientific and systematic efforts that go into protecting the human being, particularly people in the production environment, from accidents and sicknesses that they may encounter in the workplace, to avert the loss of production tools and processes, of products, facilities and sales, in the context of all sciences--from psychology to behavioral science, basic sciences to engineering and medicine, ergonomics to the latest technologies.

Benefits of HSE Management

• Operational security and safety for human lives,
• Increase in productivity,
• Increase in production quality,
• Increase in employee motivation,
• Minimization of costs,
• Achievement of a competitive edge,
• Increase of the prestige of the company as a result of the image of security created in the eyes of neighbors and in neighbor facilities,
• Prestigious position in the eyes of official authorities,
• Savings in energy,
• Performance exceeding legal regulations,
• Being prepared in emergencies.

The Management of Petrol Ofisi regards conformity to Health, Safety and Environment standards as not only a legal obligation but also as a humanitarian requirement. All employees adopt a proactive approach to ensuring that the requirements of Health, Safety and the Environment are fulfilled, acting out of the awareness of the fact that preventing work and environmental accidents before they happen is a much easier and more humanitarian approach than later trying to compensate for losses that may occur. Petrol Ofisi employees, through their HSE training, have adopted the principles of reducing losses arising from work accidents, continuing operations uninterruptedly, decreasing personnel turnover and increasing workforce and total productivity as a part of their outlook and culture.

Petrol Ofisi has defined Health, Safety and Environment risks, determining the sources of possible hazards involved in its operations and activities, in order to minimize human and material loss, to increase work productivity and support employee motivation. A control and prevention system has been created with regard to these risks.  The systems have been documented at all Terminals and Lubricant Plants by the BSI (British Standards Institution) with OHSAS 18001 (Occupational Health and Safety Management System) and ISO 14001 (Environmental Management System) certificates.

WHAT ARE OHSAS 18001 & ISO 14001 CERTIFICATES?
Certain management systems are now implemented in order to take precautions against events that affect activities, productivity and the profitability arising from the life of the workplace. These systems are first based on an analysis of the current situation and on determining what risks are involved in the business. The systems are then turned into programs that may be integrated with laws, legal regulations and by-laws for the purpose of eliminating the risks that have been determined as such. Applications are then documented within a defined system and made available to all interested parties. Such implementations are then monitored and checked. The system that relates to preventing environmental pollution, minimizing adverse effects on the environment, establishing what risks exist and improving performance in this context is called the ”Environmental Management System.” The system related to curbing risks related to occupational health and safety and improving performance in this area, is called the “OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System.”

The principal purpose of the OHSAS 18001 and ISO 14001 Management Systems is to be preventive. At the same time, however much the system is based on preventive measures; it also includes the necessary controls, corrective activities and feedback mechanisms.

Since the preventive system approach attempts to prevent mistakes before they occur, improvements and developments are observed in occupational health and safety management systems, which allow the reduction of probable risks.
The efforts of Petrol Ofisi in occupational health, safety and the environment is founded on creating more productive working conditions and clearing the working environment of possible risks, all of which is only made possible through the support and participation of the Top Level Management.