HSE (Health, Safety and Environment) in the Process Industries

Although Health, Safety and Environmental activities are often grouped together, and are often directed by a single manager, the three topics are actually quite distinct from one another. The Table below shows who or what is covered by each of the elements of HSE, and outlines the geographical scope and time line for each of those elements.

Element	Covers	Time Line
Environmental / Sustainability	All life forms	Years, possibly decades
Health	Public and workers	Months to years
Safety	Workers	Short-term or instantaneous

Health

Worker Removing Asbestos

Health issues generally affect only the workers at a facility and people living in the immediate neighborhood of that facility. The time line for health concerns is likely to be considerably shorter than for environmental issues - typically weeks or months (although some poorly understood health issues may take longer than that to diagnose and understand).

Health and environmental concerns often overlap. For example, if a company is discharging a toxic gas such as sulfur dioxide (SO₂) on a routine basis, then the company will have to be concerned about meeting the environmental rules to do with SO₂ emissions. Going beyond mere regulatory compliance however, the company may then elect to conduct analyses to determine what impact the SO

may be having on the health of the local community. The results of such a study may encourage the company management to implement control measures that are more stringent than are legally required.

Whereas environmental compliance is typically driven by legislation, many health programs - asbestos abatement in particular - are driven by litigation, particularly in the United States.

Safety

Safety issues generally affect only facility workers. (There are important exceptions to this statement; sometimes an industrial accident can impact public safety. In particular, the Bhopal event in the year 1984 led to the immediate death of thousands of people in the local community.) In general, the time line in which safety events take place is short, often just momentary.

Safety programs can be divided into three major types, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1
Types of Safety

Occupational and Behavior-Based safety are what most people think of when they hear the word "safety". These topics include issues such as training, safe work practices and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). System safety is concerned with the understanding of complex industrial systems, and the ways in which they can fail. Fault tree analysis is one of the techniques used to understand system safety.

Process safety focuses on management systems such as hazards analysis, auditing and incident investigation.

Environmental and Sustainability

Environmental programs are broad in scope; in principle, they cover all living creatures and all parts of the globe. A facility's environmental performance affects not only the communities in which they are located, but also the public in general, and

when issues such as global climate change are considered - the future of the planet itself. Increasingly, environmental professionals are using the term sustainability rather than environmentalism. The earth is viewed as having finite resources. Therefore, society's long-term goal should be, it is argued, to have as little long-term impact on the environment as possible, and, where possible, to replace resources that have been used.

Environmental issues can take a long time to develop or to understand. For example, the issue of global warming was identified as a potential problem in the late 1970s, but is only now is it becoming widely recognized as an issue that must be dealt with. Indeed the phenomenon has developed so gradually, and the global climate is affected by so many other (poorly understood) variables that many responsible professionals believe that the phenomenon of global warming either does not exist, or that its causes have not yet been full identified. It will be many years before these disagreements are resolved.

From the point of view of an HSE professional, much environmental work consists of formal compliance with regulations from a myriad of government agencies, not all of which are properly coordinated with one another. Compliance work is expensive and time-consuming, and hence is sometimes perceived by management as being merely a burden and an expense. Nevertheless, these mangers have no choice - regulatory compliance work must be carried out if the company or facility is to receive operating permits, avoid compliance penalties, and minimize legal liabilities. As noted above, a facility's risk management program must be organized so that outside auditors can check that the rules and regulations are being followed.

In one respect, the legal framework in which environmental professionals work is unusual. In most other types of legal process a person is assumed to be innocent unless proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. It is up to the prosecution to establish guilt - not to the defendant to establish innocence. In the case of environmental work, the opposite applies. Industries are generally assumed to be creating an unacceptable level of pollution - the onus is on them to demonstrate that they are not.

Our environment/sustainability page provides further information to do with environmental issues.