responsible care documents and kpi faq

All reports are treated with the greatest confidentiality. No company names and individual company KPI data will ever be mentioned publicly by ECTA. Most figures provided by RC members are consolidated by ECTA and the consolidated output will be published. This communication is used in ECTA’s annual RC report or in other ways (e.g. Social Media) to communicate about trends.

The main benefit is the opportunity to benchmark your performance against the chemical transport sector. The ECTA RC KPI forms are aligned with the specific requirements of the 2022 SQAS modules. Not only can you use the KPI forms as supporting documents during SQAS and other audits, but they also provide you an easy starting point in the discussions with your chemical customers and facilitates a more uniform approach.

The creation of SQAS in 1992 was closely linked to the Responsible Care program of the European Chemical Industry. The ECTA Responsible Care program, which started in 2009, is based on the formal agreement between Cefic and ECTA. This agreement includes references to the use of SQAS to define basic priorities regarding the requirements all ECTA RC member companies must meet. One clear example is the ECTA RC KPI form that is used for annual reporting. The relationship with SQAS is also made clear in the 2022 SQAS Core question 5.2.4.

There are three main changes from the previous KPI forms:

a. More detail of other forms of transport used on intermodal journeys in section 5 – the breakdown between rail, inland waterways and short sea are optional for 2023.

b. Incident ratios will be calculated in section 6 – you only need to enter the incident numbers and the ratios will be calculated for you. This gives more context to the incident numbers in relation to the scale of your operations.

c. More detail of engine types and fuel types in section 7 – as new technologies come along to help with lowering emissions, we want to capture the extent to which these are being used by our members.

The guidance tab on the KPI form refers you to the relevant sections of SQAS as the calculation should be the same. In turn, SQAS follows the methodology contained in the GLEC framework. The GLEC Module 5 about the emissions calculations for transport of chemical products is the basis for all SQAS 2022 questions related to emission calculation.

For some years now the world around us is focusing hard on the loss of plastic pellets or granulates. Producers are improving the control systems to avoid pellet loss, e.g. through their Operation Clean Sweep program. ECTA has also adopted this as a key area in its RC program and we want RC members to share their incident statistics via the KPI reporting.

This section 9 must be completed. The last KPI (Transport and Cleaning: section 9, Warehousing: section 6) consist of:

•2 Yes/No questions (answer based on specific SQAS questions from your last assessment)

•1 open question regarding emission reduction initiatives -Please answer the question in the excel form indicated boxes marked 1 and 2. Yours answers may be taken from your improvement plan and may refer to changes in your equipment, more accurate ways of emission registration, training of staff, operational changes to decrease emissions, etc.

It is also mandatory to send your annual improvement plan to ECTA annually. Above you find a template to download.