Fields of action from management themes

Transfer of know-how

With the increasing internationalisation of the Company and ever more complex tasks, the demands on our employees are constantly increasing. In addition to targeted training and further training it is decisive that we make our employees more aware of the kinds of findings that are important to the Company and to further improve the efficiency with which we systematically record, utilise and secure the knowledge that exists within the Company. We also use idea management to achieve this. The redeployment of employees to other German and, increasingly, foreign Group companies as well promotes cooperation in the K+S Group, ensures the transfer of know-how and strengthens the specialist and intercultural competence of our employees.

We regard it as our responsibility to use our agricultural competence to draw up advice on fertilizers tailored to the needs of humans and the environment. In particular in the emerging market and developing countries, our agricultural application advice contributes to the transfer of know-how. According to our estimates, these regions have far greater yield potentials if the concept of balanced fertilizer application is better adopted. This is why K+S trains the sales consultants of partners locally as well as those responsible on the plantations, and supports local authorities and educational institutions with information materials.

Work and health

Our objective is to protect our employees against work-related dangers and preserve their health through preventative measures. We strive to even further reduce the – compared with other industrial companies – very low number of accidents. We are working on this, in part together with the relevant authorities and the professional associations. With our Company health management, we want to maintain and improve the ability to work, commitment and motivation of our employees in the long term. We design workplaces and organisational procedures to meet the needs of health and support our employees in their health-conscious behaviour.

Biodiversity

The mining and processing of crude salts is, to a great extent, inseparable from the need to dispose of solid and liquid residues. We compensate for land used by our tailings by means of a variety of measures intended to protect nature and maintain the wide diversity of species. Moreover, we carry out various projects for covering tailings piles in order to reduce pile waters. By 2015 at the latest, we want to halve the volumes of saline waste water currently produced by our Werra potash plant within the framework of our integrated package of measures.
Water protection

Compliance

Compliance with applicable laws, corporate guidelines and regulatory standards recognised by the Company is an integral part of our corporate culture and thus a responsibility and duty of every employee. In order to ensure behaviour that complies with these regulations, we have introduced a group-wide compliance programme, which, for example, provides for employee training on the risk areas antitrust and competition law as well as anticorruption. We regard serious violations by individual employees, which could have a significant impact on the net assets, financial po-sitions and results of operations, as unlikely.

Energy efficiency

Our programme for reducing carbon dioxide emissions consists of three components: we use the best available power plant technology (cogenera-tion), we optimise our energy-saving production processes and we reduce energy consumption along the entire value chain. Thus, the efficiency level for our German power stations now exceeds 90%. Our sites are thus operating close to the theoretically attainable level of energy efficiency, so that, given the current state of technology, even further capital expenditure could hardly yield additional tangible reductions in emissions.