Employee Safety

Employee Safety

We believe that our employees are our greatest assets and that keeping them safe, healthy and secure is our top priority.

Environment, Health, Safety & Security

EHS&S Management

Agrium has well-defined EHS&S programs and processes, committed leadership, clear lines of reporting and accountability, and a responsible workforce. In addition to an overall corporate EHS&S group, we have established an EHS&S organization in each business unit. This has enabled Agrium to focus on oversight and governance as well as increasing management involvement in all of its operations and activities.

Agrium has an increasingly well-defined set of EHS&S Key Performance Indicators, annual goals and systems that are cascaded from the Chief Executive Officer throughout the organization.

Continuous improvement and performance monitoring are effected through four technical committees, two management committees and the Board EHS&S Committee. These committees meet at least quarterly to monitor performance against annual and longer-term performance goals, to discuss plans and strategies for addressing weaknesses in our processes, and to evaluate opportunities for improving our systems.

Stewarding the Environment

The environment is important to us all and we must all work together to care for it. As a corporate citizen, Agrium must take a larger role in stewarding the environment. We take this role very seriously and have instituted key performance measures into our operations to monitor air and water health indicators. Understanding our impact has helped us reduce the effect of our business in these areas and even helped us bring about positive change.

Our Commitment

We work to minimize negative impacts created through the mining, processing and transportation of our products. We also work with customers to ensure our products contribute the maximum value to their crops and reduce the opportunity they will be lost to the environment.

To make meaningful change in an environmental context we must measure our impact, determine and revise targets, integrate policies and programs into our culture and then measure again. Agrium focuses its primary efforts in three areas: air, water and land.

Click on the images below to learn how we affect each area and what we are doing to minimize our impact.

Air

How We Affect the Air

Directly and indirectly, Agrium generates greenhouse gases through the production, distribution and use of its products. These emissions may be subject to climate change policy and regulations being developed in North America, however, these policies are developing in a unique way within various state, provincial and federal jurisdictions.

What We’re Doing About It

Reducing Emissions and Introducing Carbon Capture at our Facilities

In an effort to reduce CO2 emissions, Agrium developed strategies to improve energy efficiency in its operations, capture and store carbon and reduce emissions in the fields.

Air Emissions: We report our air emissions to the Canadian National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) and the United States Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). Emissions are regularly tested to ensure they remain under regulation limits. If performance wavers, equipment is replaced to ensure predictable results.

 

Water

How We Affect the Water

There are three ways we affect water: water use in operations, water discharge and water that may be affected by nutrient use in fields.

The Use of Fertilizer by Growers

To address stakeholder concerns that nutrients are entering the environment from the use of our products on a farm, Agrium is working with industry associations, researchers, NGOs and government to establish a nutrient stewardship system. This includes the establishment of best management practices and long-term measures to monitor performance and continuously approve.

What We’re Doing About It

 At Our Facilities:

We are working with the communities where we have operations to become more efficient in water use. We also work with provincial and local governments to develop new water use and discharge standards for the Industrial Heartland area, where our Redwater and Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta facilities are located.

The region where we have our Borger, Texas facility is in the midst of a multi-year water shortage. In response to this we started using wastewater from the city of Borger sewage treatment plant as cooling water. Currently, our Borger facility reuses over 3.5 million litres of water per day that would otherwise come from the area's already scarce water supply.

We monitor our water withdrawals in an effort to decrease them. We also track pollutants discharged from our operations to surface water, publicly owned treatment works and underground injection wells. For details on our performance, refer to our sustainability report.

Reduced Impact in Agriculture:

Agrium has worked with stakeholders to develop an industry-wide nutrient stewardship system that will reduce the opportunity for product to be lost to the environment by applying the right nitrogen products at the right rate, time and place through the implementation of best management practices.

In addition to our involvement in developing best management practices, we have also developed a series of controlled release nitrogen products. As the product name indicates, these products have a smart coating that releases nutrients to match the needs of the plant. While controlled release technology is not new to turf and horticulture businesses, ESN is the first controlled release technology developed for large acre crops such as corn and wheat.  

Success Stories

 

Land

How We Affect the Land

There are a few ways that Agrium can affect land: remediating sites that we acquire or no longer need, events that impact the environment like spills, the proper disposal of hazardous waste and how nutrients affect the land after the product leaves our hands. We’re also working to replenishing the soil for quality and organic matter.

What We’re Doing About It

At Our Facilities:

Agrium practices recycling in all of its facilities and seeks to reuse palettes, packaging and by-products wherever possible. At our Vanscoy facility, we are left with salt as a by-product from mining potash ore in our mine. A partnership with neighboring NSC Minerals sees this byproduct converted into useful items like road salt and deicers.

Environmental events have occurred in the past, however, in each case Agrium seeks to identify the root cause to ensure that controls are in place to prevent recurrence. We track all environmental events in the hope to eliminate them completely.

One of the main raw materials we use to produce phosphate fertilizers is phosphate rock. The phosphate rock is mixed with sulfuric acid to dissolve the phosphorous. The reaction produces phosphoric acid and solid calcium sulfate, commonly known as "phosphogypsum". The phosphoric acid is used in fertilizer production; the phosphogypsum is a by-product and must be stored. For every tonne of phosphate rock used in the process, approximately one and a half tonnes of phosphogypsum is produced. This by-product is mixed with water to form a slurry and pumped into a phosphogypsum pond as a slurry mixture. The solids settle out, the clear water is drained to the cooling pond, and then returned to the plant for reuse. The settled gypsum is allowed to dry to a moisture content of about 40% and then a portion is excavated to raise the height of the exterior dikes of the pond. When the interior is excavated and the dikes are elevated to the necessary height, the process is repeated. As the dikes are raised, a "gyp stack" is formed. A gyp stack needs to be expanded or decommissioned when the surface area no longer supports proper drying of the gyp for repeated dike construction or when a permitted height limit is reached.

Success Stories