■ Where We Work

Safety Initiatives

In 2010 Buckeye renewed our corporate-wide commitment to safety and implemented a variety of strategic initiatives. The process started with a “Safety Day” initiative in which Kris Matula, our President and COO, traveled to each of the sites to share his expectations regarding safety. During this “Day of Safety”, Kris met with employees to hear their concerns and express his desire and support to improve safety. Kris’s message was clear: “We need to strive for an injury free workplace, and we must all get engaged in safety to turn the results around.”

In previous years, Buckeye’s Total Incident Rate (TIR) was in the bottom quartile of the industry at 3.5 to 4.6. Our goal is to move to the top quartile of the industry which requires a TIR of about 1.0.

Extensive training and involvement of all employees is required to meet this aggressive goal. Buckeye engaged Milliken Performance Solutions™ strategic consultants to help guide our development of an employee-led safety process, changing the way we manage safety.

Milliken is a textile company, which has developed an extremely successful safety process. Utilized at their sites, it has provided Milliken with a company TIR of 0.6. The process relies on employees taking the lead, while management assumes a more supportive, coaching role.

We started this process at our Foley plant with a “kick-off” event in November. A Milliken-trained safety committee presented the new process to the employees and encouraged involvement with a “Football Tailgate”. Sixty percent of the employees signed up to work on safety sub-committees and are now training to lead safety initiatives and projects throughout the plant.


This process is now being extended to the Delta, Gaston and King sites. All sites will adopt this approach in the coming years.

The BSST (Buckeye Safety Stewardship Committee) initiative also began in 2010. This committee, with representatives from each site, convenes monthly to discuss site safety concerns and initiatives. Each reported incident is thoroughly investigated and changes are implemented to insure similar incidents do not occur at other locations.

We are pleased that these efforts resulted in improvements to our 2010 TIR, reducing it to 2.5. This places us 25th out of 46 companies in the recent American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA) year-end benchmarking.



We believe the employee-led safety initiatives we have implemented are working, and we expect to reach our goal of a TIR of 1.0. This will position us among the top safety performing companies in our industry.

In addition to these excellent corporate results in 2010, several of our individual sites achieved award-winning safety results in specific focus areas.