Safety Improvement Tools

Members of Fertilizers Europe report major accidents and incidents relevant to fertilizers and fertilizer production, to Fertilizers Europe. Reliable information about incidents is quickly circulated by Fertilizers Europe to all member companies as part of the industry’s Rapid Alert System.

Fertilizers Europe keeps arecord of all relevant accidents that have occurred in member companies and elsewhere. Experts of Fertilizers Europe analyze these accidents in regular meetings and lessons learnt are shared with all member companies. This enables prevention of such accidents from happening again.

Selected safety themes are part of an annual Safety Seminar of Fertilizers Europe where members have the opportunity to exchange views and to learn from each other. Frequently the Seminars are the basis for updating of the Best Practice Guidelines or the establishment of new ones. The themes at past Seminars have been:

1997: Learning from accidents
1998: Ammonia
1999: Nitric acid
2000: Ammonium nitrate
2001: Safety management systems
2003: Regulatory issues
2004: EU legislation
2005: Transportation
2006: Learning from past accidents
2007: Maintenance, shutdown, turnaround
2008: Fire hazards and behavior-based aspects of safety
2009: Safety risk analysis, accidents with pumps, accidents in AN and NPK plants
2010: Accidents in NPK, crisis management
2011: Safety in storage
2012: recent safety, health and environment developments affecting fertilizers
2013: Safety and environmental issues associated with production of ammonia and ammonium nitrate related fertilizers.
2014: Safety in operation of ammonia and downstream fertilizer plants, as well as in the distribution of finished fertilizers