"To ensure the safety of people as our highest priority, reduce and eliminate risks through the appropriate allocation of management resources and the maintenance and improvement of facilities, pro-cesses and work mechanisms with the aim to eliminate accidents and injuries while also making efforts to cultivate our safety culture" is the policy for ensuring safety. The ensuring of safety based on this policy is the result of management efforts and realizing zero accidents and disasters is the foremost achievement of these efforts. Based on this recognition, the following specific policies are established as the most important standard to be prioritized to ensure safety for the various criteria for determining value in each scene and stage in all our business activities including production, logistics, sales and research and development, in all our operations and all our activities .
Our group has traditionally positioned "Safety, Health and the Environment" as the foundation of its management, and has established the "Safety & Environmental Protection Headquarters" to promote initiatives to secure and preserve them. The executive in charge of safety and environment (director), who is delegated by the President and Representative Director, serves as the General Manager of the Safety & Environmental Protection Headquarters, overseeing the headquarters as the person in charge of safety, health, and environment.
The role of the Headquarters is to determine the Medium-term Management Plan, the annual basic policies and priority issues on HSSE, to assess and evaluate performance through audits, to maintain, review, and improve the Safety Management System* and the Environmental Management System, and to instruct all executive departments and major group companies to secure management resources necessary to establish, implement, maintain, and continually improve the Management Systems. As a general rule, we have the Safety & Environmental Protection Headquarters Meeting once a year in December to decide on our group's annual basic policies for the next fiscal year.
Each executive department appoints a manager in charge of safety and environment to manage and promote the overall HSSE activities of the department, including the business sites under its management.
In addition, in order to confirm and promote the HSSE activities of each executive department, the General Manager of the Safety & Environmental Protection Headquarters or top management visits business sites to provide Safety and Environment-related instructions or safety patrols, or the Safety & Environmental Protection Headquarters secretariat conducts Safety and Environment audits at business sites. In particular, at our company's refineries and plants, the General Manager of the Safety & Environmental Protection Headquarters provides Safety and Environment-related instruction and safety patrol once a year, while the Safety & Environmental Protection Headquarters secretariat conducts Safety and Environment audit once a year.
Furthermore, in order to prevent large-scale disasters at our business sites, we have established the Safety and Safety Assurance Advisory Committee, which consists of members, including external experts, as an advisory body to the Board of Directors or the President and Representative Director, with the aim of establishing more effective safety and safety assurance measures.