Safety
Nothing is more important than the safety of our employees, contractors and visitors.
“Our most important responsibility is to ensure everyone working for International Paper arrives home safely every day.”
Mark Sutton
Chairman & CEO
Ensuring everyone - employees and non-employees - arrives home safely every day is our most important responsibility.
We focus on achieving injury-free operations by:
- Promoting accountability and responsibility for ourselves and our colleagues
- Applying safety leadership skills
- Engaging employees to use safety leading indicators
- Anticipating, recognizing and removing hazards
- Intervening during unsafe conditions
- Integrating layers of protection into our work systems and processes
- Maintaining an active safety mindset at work and at home
- Fostering a learning culture where we learn from events and near misses
Life-Changing Injury & Fatality Elimination (LIFE)
Our LIFE (Life-changing Injury and Fatality Elimination) initiative focuses on eliminating the most serious injuries and implementing sustainable systems to prevent all injuries and incidents. Project teams use our company's manufacturing excellence tools, communications channels, LIFE investigations, employee engagement, training and general education to improve workplace safety. LIFE is designed to make everyone aware of serious injury risks.
The LIFE program has five focus areas:
- Driver safety
- Machine safeguarding
- Exposure to harmful substances or environments
- Motorized equipment
- Slips, trips and falls
All manufacturing and non-manufacturing sites report on engagement in safety leading indicators to help identify areas for improvement and where resources are needed to properly execute our programs. These seven safety leading indicators are a proactive approach to measure progress in preventative safety efforts.
Safety leading indicators works in conjunction with our LIFE program, which aims to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries, such as concussions, fractures, burns and amputations. Team members report near-miss events - called LIFE Potentials - that did not result in serious injury because the hazard was recognized before a potential injury occurred. The 145 LIFE potentials reported by our team per month allow us to proactively identify performance trends and areas for continuous improvement.
Safety
Vision 2020 Goal
Stated Goal: Injury-free workplace