Smiths in the environment

We are committed to ensuring that, as far as is reasonably practicable, any detrimental effects of our activities, products and services upon the environment are minimised.

Organisational arrangements

Smiths environment, health and safety (EHS) programmes start with the EHS policy which was revised and endorsed by Philip Bowman in January 2008 and is reproduced at the back of this report.

The policy deployment process is hierarchical within the Group matrix. The Executive Committee develops policy and monitors performance. The EHS Steering Committee, which comprises senior group and divisional representatives, develops strategy and ensures progress. The EHS Technical Committee develops programmes that implement the strategy, share best practices and provide training opportunities. Regional co-ordinators and local EHS staff provide feedback on performance and issues.

Managing environmental impacts

All Smiths manufacturing facilities with more than 50 employees are required to achieve certification to the international management system standard ISO14001 and new acquisitions and sites that grow above this threshold have two years to comply.

Currently we have five sites that fall into the latter category and are working on their programmes. We have seventy-seven sites already certified, providing an externally verified framework for continual improvement, compliance assurance, emergency preparedness and management review.

Performance against targets

Having achieved the three-year goals to the end of July 2007, new goals were established to further challenge our environmental performance. Smiths has set itself the target of reducing water consumption by 9%, waste generation by 9% (both normalised against sales) and to cap its greenhouse gas emissions at FY 2006 – 2007 levels (absolute). These goals are to be achieved by 31 July 2010.

Each of our key indicators shows improvement during the year and we will report on further progress and initiatives towards our three-year goals.

Our new data management system has been live for over a year now and has given us the ability to improve the quality and timeliness of the data with monthly reporting and real time checking for errors. A greater number of Smiths businesses than ever before now report and it is much easier to include or exclude acquired or divested businesses. The 2007 data here has been adjusted to remove business disposals during the year and the 2008 data does not include recent acquisitions.

There were very few environmental fines received this financial year and the largest related to a waste water discharge breach at the John Crane facility in Mexico. The breach occurred in October 2004 and the fine had a total value of 10,114 Mexican pesos (£545). The non-compliance was corrected.