A Jackson Township business won a state award for workplace safety.

Ascensus Specialties Callery LLC, a company producing chemicals primarily for pharmaceutical operations, received the Governor's Award for Safety Excellence, an annual award given to two Pennsylvania businesses to recognize their dedication to and innovation in the area of safety.

“This is extremely important for us,” said company spokeswoman Brooke Schwartzel. “One of the things that we stress in everything we do is safety, so this is an honor for us. We do live safely.”

One example of Ascensus' dedication to safety, Schwartzel said, is that its 96 employees have worked more than 1 million hours without an incident that causes a loss of production time for the company.

That's even more impressive, she added, when the nature of Ascensus' work is taken into consideration.

“That's a really hard thing to do, especially in a specialty chemical base where you're handling hazardous materials quite regularly,” Schwartzel said.

Although the work with chemical reagents makes it a challenge to work without work-stopping safety incidents, the aggressive safety tactics the business uses are a necessity and naturally stem from the nature of its work.

“You have to have extremely high standards for safety (to win the award), which we do because of the hazardous nature of the work that we do,” Schwartzel said. “There are chemicals that can cause harm for our employees and other people if they're improperly handled.” Ascensus works with them with regularity.

At Ascensus, the “safety points” program helped improve safety by giving employees an opportunity to fill out a piece of paper whenever they saw something unsafe and suggest a correction.

“This could be anything, including something like somebody not holding a hand rail coming down the stairs,” Schwartzel said.

One of the other major factors in why Ascensus — as well as Allegheny County-based ABMECH Acquisitions, a hazardous materials remediation company — was awarded the honor was the impact of safety committees in both workplaces, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry.

Ascensus' safety committee meets monthly, at which time employees discuss safety concerns, resolutions and prevention tactics, Schwartzel said.

For a company that's been around since the 1930s, and which Schwartzel said is the only Western Hemisphere manufacturer for some of its products, it's an accomplishment to receive the award.

“One of our slogans that we've used in the past (is) 'to live safely,'” she said. “With everyone's hard work and not having any incidents that would lose work-time, having everyone committed to the idea that safety's important shows that we go above and beyond every day.”