Sustainability

Throughout Boart Longyear, environmental, health, and safety (EHS) are our top priority. We have a responsibility to our communities, employees, contractors, customers and shareholders to proactively strengthen our safety culture. Our management tracking system for EHS incidents sends daily emails, promptly reporting on every incident in every country in which we operate. We are continually enhancing our EHS programs and implementing best practices to ensure we can develop new processes and practices that help reduce safety incidents.

When it comes to the environment, our areas of focus include air quality controls, energy and water conservation, and waste and hazardous materials minimisation. Some examples of environmental projects undertaken during 2011 include:

• Introducing high-efficiency paint guns and water-based paints in three of our manufacturing sites. This has reduced VOC (volatile organic compounds) by three metric tonnes – equivalent to more than 200,000 vehicle kilometres.
• Installing high-efficiency lighting at two manufacturing sites and upgrading a high-demand compressor. This has provided almost 900,000 kWh in energy savings- sufficient to power 78 homes for a year.
• Filtering and reusing process waste water has reduced waste water disposal by 90 percent at one site – equivalent to more than 2,700 car washes at 380 litres per wash.
• Implementing waste minimisation measures to reduce solid waste disposal at one site by 75 percent, or 265 tonnes annually – equivalent to the annual solid waste production of 371 people.

Our commitment to the well-being of our employees, our customers and the environment is reinforced by having our ISO 14001 environmental and OSHAS 18001 certifications renewed annually at all global operations and facilities.