Sasol annual report 2007 - sustainable development review 3/6

Sustainability

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	Sustainability
	Introduction
	2007 performance highlights & disappointments
	Key focus areas
	Material safety, health and environmental (SH&E) risks at Sasol

	Managing our economic, social and environmental performance
	Our sustainable development performance

Sustainable development review (continued) Pages | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |

Focusing on skills development

As a globally expanding high-technology company, our operations require a wide range of skills, from highly proficient scientists and engineers to lawyers, financial specialists and artisans. Our current and future success depends on our ability to attract, retain and develop highly skilled individuals. In South Africa, there is a recognised shortage of suitably skilled labour, and it is a challenge to acquire the required professionals to help us sustain Sasol’s growth.

Our commitment to promoting skills development has been formalised into Project TalentGro. This is a multi-pronged approach aimed at improving our internal skills development capacity, expanding Sasol’s operations support to grow key talent pools, and influencing the external skills development environment by participating in other initiatives and engaging industry leaders.

A management training course at
Sasol Technology, Secunda.

Promoting black economic empowerment

Our biggest socioeconomic challenge in South Africa is to play a successful role in stimulating the advance of the broad-based empowerment of historically disadvantaged South Africans, particularly black people (African, Coloured and Indian).

To promote our black economic empowerment (BEE) commitment, we operate a BEE coordination office at corporate level. This office oversees the integration and coordination of all corporate and group BEE initiatives and activities in support of the codes of good practice. These activities comprise six components in our South African businesses:

•	introducing into our businesses equity ownership by historically disadvantaged people;
•	procuring goods and services, preferentially, from historically disadvantaged business people;
•	progressing employment equity;
•	building human capacity and talent in industry;
•	facilitating the development of smaller BEE enterprises; and
•	promoting social upliftment through corporate social investment.

Further details on our activities in each of these components of our broad-based BEE Scorecard are provided elsewhere in this annual review, and in more detail in our sustainable development report, which also includes a review of Sasol Mining’s activities in terms of the requirements of the Mining Charter.

Upholding our code of ethics

Our code of ethics has four fundamental ethical principles – responsibility, honesty, fairness and respect – and 15 ethical standards. These standards cover such issues as bribery and corruption, fraud, insider trading, human rights and discrimination. We have an ethics forum to monitor and report on ethics best practice and compliance requirements, and to recommend amendments to the code. Employee performance against Sasol’s values, incorporating the code of ethics, is assessed as part of our mandatory employee performance management system.

We have been operating an independent and well-supported South African-based ethics reporting telephone line since 2001. This provides stakeholders with an impartial facility to anonymously report misconduct. Our forensics team investigates all reported economic crimes, and conducts an audit to investigate and follow-up on these reported concerns.

This year we commissioned an independent study, conducted by the Ethics Institute of South Africa, to assess the levels of awareness and the perceptions within Sasol of our code of ethics and supporting activities. We are implementing measures in response to this study.

Respecting human rights

In addition to ensuring compliance with the legal regimes of all the countries in which we operate, we are committed to the human rights principles of the United Nations (UN) Global Compact. As we extend our operations into countries considered to have human rights concerns, we recognise the importance of ensuring our activities comply with internationally accepted standards of behaviour, and not local legislation alone.

We recently commissioned an independent study to assess the implications of our commitment to the UN Global Compact principles on human rights. We presented the outcomes of this study at an international workshop, where we shared a platform with the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. The report has also been disseminated in formal UN publications and on the website of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. The findings of the report will inform our approach to managing human rights throughout the group.

Participating in sustainability indices

Sasol’s overall score within the oil and gas producing sector of the Dow-Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) improved from 68% to 70%. The average score in our industry group was 53% and the highest was 77%. Although Sasol was rated above the industry average in most criteria, our overall score was below the top decile level required for inclusion in the 2007 DJSI. This reflects the increased level of competition on the DJSI and the level of improvement of some of our peers. We will continue to focus our efforts on addressing areas of weakness with the aim of being included in the DJSI next year.

The 2007 JSE socially responsible investment (SRI) index results are not yet available. In the previous two years Sasol was included in the top six of the 30 high-impact listed companies that qualified for this index. We hope to maintain this level in 2007

Promoting product stewardship

Recognising the risk management and marketing benefits associated with environmentally preferred products, particularly in the context of the global policy shift towards focusing on the impacts of products rather than processes alone, Sasol is adopting a life-cycle approach to the products we develop, manufacture, use, distribute and sell.

Since 2003 a formalised global support structure – with assigned responsibilities in each of the key companies – has been in place with the goal of ensuring a structured, group-wide response to product stewardship. We continue to play a leading role in relevant working groups of the European Chemical Industries’ Council and the American Chemistry Council. We support the development of, and will adopt, the Global Harmonised System for Classification. An internal working group has been set up to ensure full compliance by Sasol with the far-reaching requirements of the EU regulations concerning the Registration, Evaluation, and Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH).

Sustaining strong social investments

Sasol’s corporate social investment (CSI) programme is guided by our vision of promoting peoplecentred, needs-driven sustainable development of communities, focusing on those regions where we have our largest footprint. We have committed more than R600 million to social upliftment and human development through our CSI initiatives over the last decade. These investments have been channelled into five main areas: education (35%); health and welfare (25%); job creation (25%); arts, culture and sport development (5%); and the natural environment (5%).

In South Africa we have invested more than R36 million in socioeconomic development projects during the year, mostly in the Sasolburg and Secunda communities and along the Mozambique-to- Secunda pipeline route. This investment excludes the R28,5 million committed to bursaries. While most of our social investments are undertaken in Southern Africa, important community-based initiatives are undertaken by our US and European operations. During the year, these operations and their employees contributed substantially to community projects. Employees in the USA donated thousands of volunteer hours to help with community projects.

Sasol invested more than R36 million in
socioeconomic development projects
during the year.

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