Health and Safety

At our sites, we focused on reducing the risk of incidents, injuries and exposure to health hazards for all team members, visitors and contractors, and we designed operating protocols for our facilities to provide a safe and healthy work environment. In addition to the Company’s responsibilities in safety, importantly, we also work hard to cultivate our culture of safety, where every team member has a shared responsibility for and is engaged in safety.

In 2023, we remained steadfast in our relentless approach to safety, and that resulted in positive success in almost every measurable aspect of safety. Throughout the year, we further enhanced our focus on our proactive approach to safety, especially on the prevention of serious events and injuries. A serious event is one that, if conditions or outcomes had been slightly different, could have had a lasting impact on the team member.

The prevention of serious injuries is accomplished through the proactive elimination of hazards, finding safer alternatives, using engineering controls to minimize the probability and severity of incidents, improving processes and through positive changes in behaviors/choices. This takes a cross-functional and coordinated group effort, from our newest team member on the production floor, to our senior leadership team. This focus resulted in West achieving a 21% decrease (i.e., improvement) in our 2023 Serious Injury Rate (SIR) as compared to our baseline year in 2022.

Our team members continued to be fully engaged in the safety process, and in 2023, more than 35,000 See-Do-Say submissions were entered by our team members across our global network of sites. This proactive hazard identification program promotes team members’ ability to recognize workplace hazards and provides an outlet for them to take ownership in taking immediate action to mitigate that risk and/or report it to their supervisor.

To help drive accountability, awareness and ongoing education, we continued to hold our annual global Safety Week, which saw high engagement and participation at our sites. Although safety is a focus all year long, this dedicated week gave the opportunity to target several key safety-related topics, including Ergonomics, Power Industrial Truck (PIT) safety and Emergency Preparedness and Safety at Home.

Safety Callouts

• 21% decrease in SIR compared to 2022
• More than 35,000 See-Do-Say Submissions entered by our team members across our global sites
• 52 Safety Impact Awards given to recognize our team members’ outstanding commitments to safety
• Our focus on PIT safety resulted in the training of over 2,000 PIT operators
• With a continued focus on leading indicators, 96% of investigations for serious incidents were closed within the goal of 7 shift days