While we care for our environment and appreciate its effect on our health and future well-being, we consider it equally important to care for the occupational health and safety (OH&S) of our employees. We trust that a healthy, safe and comfortable working environment will help to create a harmonious corporate culture. We aspire to make EMSD an attractive workplace with interesting job challenges, high job satisfaction, co-operative values, low absenteeism and zero work injury.

We began establishing our Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems in 2000. As we stated last year, our aim is to achieve OHSAS 18001 certification in each business unit. We are pleased to report that we were awarded an OHSAS 18001 Corporate Certificate in October 2001, after external accreditation for nine business units (details of the certificates are shown in Annexes). We have not been complacent after attaining this achievement and we are now working to extend this system to our Regulatory Services arm to ensure full compliance with our stated policy.