The Responsible Care Audit System of Sumitomo Chemical

Sumitomo Chemical established in 1913 to manufacture fertilizers from sulfur dioxide emitted from copper smelting operations at the Besshi copper mine in Niihama, Ehime Prefecture with the aim of solving environmental problems caused by the emissions.

At present, the Sumitomo Chemical Group, including over 100 subsidiaries and affiliates, operates businesses in five sectors, petrochemicals, energy & functional materials, IT-related chemicals, health &crop sciences and pharmaceuticals and provides products worldwide that support a wide variety of industries and help people’s daily lives.

Responsible Care (RC) activities are the chemical industry's voluntary initiatives to ensure the safety of chemical substances, protect the environment and health, and maintain and improve product quality in all processes from development through to manufacture, distribution, use, final consumption and disposal, and also to gain the further trust of society through continuous dialogue with all stakeholders. In RC, Sumitomo Chemical sets targets in each of the following fields: occupational safety and health, industrial safety and disaster prevention, chemical safety, environmental protection and energy issue, and product liability.

The objective of this Internal Responsible Care (RC) Audit is not only to prevent from RC compliance problems but also to promote the improvement of Sumitomo Chemical Group (SCG) management system by auditing in a strong, credible and effective manner within SCG. RC audit activities play a very important roll to enhance RC management of SCG world-widely.

Our audit functions consist of the following four- step approach.

Step1: Sharing Sumitomo’s business principles and philosophy

Step2: Promoting an understanding of and sharing in RC policies, RC management systems, and Group RC standards

Step3: Establishing and developing RC management systems in each Group company

Step4: Carrying out modifications to the direction and adjusting levels of RC activities by the result of RC audits

By face-to-face communication through each of the aforementioned steps, we have successfully given assistance to put in place RC management system with taking into consideration the scale, type of business, and features of each Group company.

In this presentation, our RC auditing framework to manage risks in today’s business environment and what our RC audit functions are to promote RC global management of the Group are introduced.

Keywords:　Internal Audit, Risk management