I am pleased to present GrafTech’s second annual Sustainability Report highlighting our ESG performance in 2020. I would like to thank our global team for their tireless work, resilience, and diligence in responding to the challenges faced during 2020 while upholding our core values of Safety, Environment, and Quality, what we internally refer to as “SEQ”. These values focus our attention on a core mission for GrafTech: safe working practices and conditions, environmental stewardship, and superior product quality. We begin meetings at GrafTech with SEQ and we refer to SEQ topics throughout this report.
Safety. We begin, as we always do, with safety. We are committed to health and safety excellence, exemplified by our improvement in 2020’s total recordable injury rate to 0.51, a 46% improvement over 2019, continuing the improving trend over the past few years. I am very proud of the dedication of our team as we work to reach our ultimate goal of every employee going home safely every day.
In the spirit of SEQ, we instituted a number of health and safety initiatives during 2020 to ensure we maintain our high standard of excellence. For example, we enhanced our health and safety auditing program by qualifying 37 employees as internal auditors of our health and safety programs.
Environment. As you will read about further in this report, we are committed to improving our environmental footprint. We continue to monitor and track our progress on energy consumption and air emissions to identify opportunities for improvements. During 2020, at our Monterrey, Mexico facility, we continued to implement projects focused on controlling emissions, such as installation of new dust collection systems and upgrades to our mill, mix and forming, and baking operations to enhance our air emission controls. We also implemented projects that helped us realize a reduction in energy and greenhouse gas emissions, in addition to our successful water recycling and reuse programs at our Calais, France, and Pamplona, Spain, sites.
Quality. On the quality front, we recently reassessed key performance indicator (KPI) tracking and reporting to reinforce best practices within our quality procedures. For our customers, we offer an electric arc furnace monitoring system, ArchiTech® Furnace Productivity System (ArchiTech®), which helps them use our products more efficiently and improve their operations.
Overall, we are proud of the progress we made across the organization towards our ESG initiatives in 2020. In addition to the initiatives mentioned above, we undertook activities as varied as our community involvement and outreach at our Monterrey and Salvador sites, our capture of energy generated at our Seadrift Coke facility to create an additional source of electricity for the area, and our emission reduction efforts that include capital investments and advanced engineering technology on the equipment at our sites. We are fully committed to advancing these efforts across our global organization.
Finally, in 2021, we undertook a robust materiality assessment with the assistance of an external consultant and are very encouraged by the results, which will help GrafTech build the foundation and strategy of our future sustainability work.
As always, I welcome your questions and comments on our sustainability efforts and look forward to engaging with you on these topics as we move forward.
Sincerely,
David J. Rintoul, President & Chief Executive Officer