BD’s management approach to Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) embraces the same characteristics that describe how we manage every important aspect of our business. Our many success stories reflect our efforts to integrate EHS into our operating processes. 

Continuous Improvement is a BD Core Value and has played a critical role in our EHS management approach for more than 20 years. Historically, BD has focused on meeting regulatory compliance in our manufacturing operations around the world. In many regions, we are now embarking upon new EHS initiatives that can generally be described as “beyond compliance.”

On the environmental front, we are striving to reduce our environmental footprint through energy and water use reduction. In the health and safety arena, the Company is driving toward zero accidents both in our own workplaces and in the clinical settings of our customers – where incidence of healthcare worker infection through accidental needlesticks poses a risk.

We are also reducing variation in how we drive EHS performance within our businesses. We began to centralize the rollout of health and safety metrics and create a best practice repository at the corporate level in 2007. Plans are in place for environmental metrics and best practices to follow.

We have been gauging our progress and performance through a comprehensive worldwide EHS compliance audit process, which has been expanded to include a management system component that incorporates the principles of “Plan, Do, Check, Act.”

We are confident that our management approach will enable us to realize our vision for EHS performance, a future state that is consistent with our commitment to “Helping all people live healthy lives.”

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Managing Suppliers’ Impacts

BD conducts quality audits of key suppliers to ensure the quality of our products as well as an uninterrupted supply of materials. When the Company selects a supplier, that decision is based on the following criteria:

• Assurance of supply
• Service levels
• Cost
• Quality
• Innovation
• Regulatory impacts

Since 2007, BD has included social and environmental criteria in our finished goods supplier questionnaire. This supplier self-assessment requests responses about child labor, discrimination, forced labor and overtime, collective bargaining rights, sanitary facilities, benefits, ISO certification and more.

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Safety and Environmental Programs and Procedures

The safety and environmental management system at BD begins with our corporate Safety and Environmental Policy.

To ensure compliance with our corporate policy, applicable government regulations and good manufacturing practices, BD audits all of our manufacturing and distribution centers worldwide. We perform audits on a regular audit cycle with a follow-up visit within 12 months. Over the last five years, we have completed 72 internal audits of our operations and 43 follow-up reviews. Our intention is to continue to focus upon regulatory compliance while leading our operations toward a management systems approach. Toward this end, we have incorporated a management systems review into our on-going audit program. In addition, we have installed a database system for managing EHS issues in approximately half of BD’s manufacturing locations.

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Continuous Improvement: Environmental Performance

With the risks of climate change ever more prevalent and an increased focus on carbon regulations, BD is working more diligently than ever to expand on and develop stronger environmental performance programs. We currently work with our manufacturing sites to identify and reduce environmental impacts from their operations using Lean manufacturing tools and methodology. As BD moves toward establishing environmental reduction targets, this approach at the manufacturing level will support efforts to meet and exceed our goals.

Potential targets could be focused in the following high-priority areas:

• Energy use and greenhouse gas emissions
• Renewable energy use
• Water consumption
• Non-hazardous waste generation
• Hazardous waste
• Off-site recycling and waste recycled from production processes
• Ozone-depleting substances

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Continuous Improvement: Reducing the Environmental Impact of Our Products

• Our research and development efforts and manufacturing processes includes a review of the materials we use and the potential environmental effects our products may have.

• We have in place mechanisms designed to identify chemical substances that are present in our product. These include efforts to identify chemicals utilized in our products through, for example, supplier surveys, and we consider safer alternatives to the extent they become available and are efficacious and cost-effective.

• We are investing considerable resources in complying with various European Union (“EU”) Directives, such as the “VOC” Directive (which limits emissions of volatile organic compounds resulting from the use of organic solvents in certain activities and installations); the “WEEE” Directive (which deals with the reduction of waste from waste electrical and electronic equipment); and the new “REACH” Regulation (which requires that all chemicals above certain volumes that are imported and/or used in the EU be registered, evaluated, authorized, and, in some cases, restricted by a new European Chemicals Agency).

• In particular, we also actively monitor the status of the medical device exemption from the EU’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances (“RoHS”) Directive, which requires that certain listed hazardous substances be reduced in new electrical and electronic equipment. In anticipation that the RoHS Directive exemption were no longer to apply, we are undertaking appropriate efforts. For example, with respect to electronic products that we sell or incorporate into our products, we have started to purchase computer hardware (e.g., screens, keyboards, printers) that complies with the RoHS Directive.

• We are also developing a strategy to eliminate brominated fire retardants (BFR) from products we sell. We have surveyed our suppliers with regard to their use of BFRs, which are contained in electronic components we purchase; we are seeking, and will evaluate, their products that do not contain BFRs and are efficacious and cost-effective.

Continuous Improvement: Lean Enterprise Manufacturing and Six Sigma

As part of BD’s journey to greatness, we focus on increasing operational effectiveness through Continuous Improvement. The following elements of Continuous Improvement have resulted in substantial performance improvements:

• Procurement (Category Management)
• Lean Manufacturing
• Six Sigma
• Validation

BD has developed a number of innovative programs to reduce waste and thereby lower production costs. We drive these advances through our Continuous Improvement framework. The Lean Initiative is the latest platform for eliminating waste in our work processes. Encompassing a clear management philosophy and practical tactics, the Lean Initiative uses low-tech methods to prevent seven types of waste: inefficient processing, unnecessary motions, waiting, making too much, fixing defects, moving things and excess inventory. Lean manufacturing allows us to better understand processes and identify areas of wasted effort or materials. Using a highly focused team of operators, engineers, managers and support personnel, this initiative drives continuous improvement in BD operations and integrates with ongoing Six Sigma and High Performance Work Systems to help the Company achieve world-class levels of manufacturing.

BD's Six Sigma initiative complements Lean by focusing on the reduction of variation in process. This focus bolsters manufacturing, transactional and design processes, which ultimately results in improved cost efficiency and more robust products and services to BD customers. Some of our Six Sigma projects include: improving inventory accuracy, increasing forecast accuracy, telecommunications cost reduction, workman’s compensation billing reduction, eliminating documentation errors, misclassification of expenses, improving compliance tracking and reducing the number of “short” shipments via UPS. Countless Six Sigma improvement project examples exist within Manufacturing Operations. The Manufacturing Six Sigma initiative is the oldest in the Company, begun in 1997.

The newest frontier in BD's Six Sigma initiative is Design for Six Sigma (DFSS), where the goal is to design products better as they are brought to market. All three BD segments – BD Medical, BD Diagnostics and BD Biosciences – have seen improvements using DFSS. The plan is to fully integrate DFSS into BD's Global Product Design System (GPDS). Altogether, these projects result in significant savings for the facilities at which they are implemented. Information about each of these projects is available on our Six Sigma databases so they can be implemented at other BD facilities. The Company also publishes a newsletter, “Continuous Improvement and You,” which highlights new initiatives, resources and success stories to provide associates with ideas and tools to improve their workplace and see what others have already achieved.

We have been working to improve our capability to validate manufacturing processes since 2002. Validation is a critical component of our Continuous Improvement business strategy and ensures that our processes consistently result in products that meet our customers’ needs, with quality built into the system at each step. We developed a single standard and set of tools using industry best practices that allow our scientific and engineering community to accurately characterize risks within our manufacturing processes and design appropriate controls within the system. BD's validation efforts are led by a worldwide cross-Unit and Regional Core Team, which has developed technology-specific Validation Toolkits. This Core Team also provides ongoing training and education to BD associates at all levels to assure we maintain our expertise in validation in a continually changing environment.

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Certification Status

Many BD facilities have implemented environmental management systems that conform to ISO 14001, a voluntary international standard. The following sites have received third-party certification to ISO 14001:

• BD in Brazil, Curitiba
• BD in Ireland, Drogheda
• BD in Ireland, Dun Laoghaire
• BD in Mexico, Nogales
• BD in Puerto Rico, Cayey
• BD in Singapore, Tuas
• BD in Singapore, Yishun
• BD in Spain, Fraga
• BD in Spain, San Agustin
• BD in Sweden, Helsingborg
• BD in UK, Plymouth
• BD in UK, Swindon
• BD in USA, Sandy, Utah

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