A focus on compliance, ethics, and EHS (environmental, health and safety) performance is fundamental to how our company is run. We believe excellence in these areas creates value for our consumers, customers, local communities, our employees, government agencies, and the firm.

Achieving our vision starts with company leadership. Leaders must commit to the compliance priority and lead through actions, not just words. Once this culture begins to take hold, the company focuses on compliance systems, standards, and programs to help achieve and sustain compliance excellence.

For example, our Compliance, Ethics and EHS Excellence Risk Management System leverages the skills and knowledge of people across the company to improve in all areas. It facilitates continuous improvement through a “plan-do-check-adjust” model to achieve the goal of superior performance.

Our efforts are inspired by the very core of the company's philosophy. Under Market Based Management®, Georgia-Pacific’s 10 guiding principles (pdf) start with Integrity and Compliance. In other words, we insist on profits and growth obtained with integrity, full regulatory compliance, and excellence in all aspects of EHS.

Ultimately, the vision, culture development and management system help Georgia-Pacific employees achieve compliance and ethics excellence. We strive not only to meet legal requirements and company standards, but also to go beyond those levels. 

In environmental performance, we endeavor to do more than the legal minimum by continually working to reduce our footprint. In health and safety, we follow all legal requirements as well as work to identify and manage risks that could result in injury to our employees, contractors or others.