A company joins the Responsible Care programme by signing a commitment, which obliges the signatory to comply with the programme’s general principles and guidelines. The company must cooperate with other companies and inform its stakeholders about environmental and safety issues.

The Responsible Care programme brings together, in a comprehensive manner, the company’s activities related to the environment, health and safety. The programme provides practical tools for developing operations and activities. The operational model, called management system framework, follows the approach favoured in management systems, and such standards are applicable tools in the implementation of the Responsible Care guideline principles. The key feature of the programme is continuous improvement of operations. To this end the companies evaluate operations, set objectives, develop actions, measure results and assess the realisation of goals on an ongoing basis.

For improved performance, every company implements the Responsible Care programme based on its own starting points. For some companies safety issues are in the core of the development efforts, for others the emphasis may lie in minimizing emissions or energy consumption.