Sustainability

Airgas has always been committed to conducting our operations to ensure sustainability and advance the goals of safety, environmental protection and social responsibility. Our operating model—one in which customer engagement decisions are driven as close to our customers as possible—is localized, and as such many of our past sustainability efforts have also been localized, making results difficult to quantify.

This past year, we engaged in valuable discussions with a number of our stockholders and have committed ourselves to ramping up our efforts and providing greater transparency so that those efforts can be properly understood and evaluated by all of our stakeholders. In support of that commitment, the Charter of our Board's Governance and Compensation Committee has been amended to add, as one of the responsibilities of the Committee, the oversight of the Company's sustainability programs and practices. We also formed a Sustainability Committee comprised of senior managers representing our various business units and headed by Andy Cichocki, President of Airgas USA, LLC. This Committee expects to take prompt action to formalize its objectives, set targets and goals, and establish appropriate methods to gather and disseminate information.

As the paragraphs below reflect, we are already doing great things and we are excited about the road ahead.

Fleet Safety

At Airgas, driving safety is paramount and our performance in this area was validated again in calendar year 2013 when we earned two Fleet Safety Excellence Awards from the Compressed Gas Association. Our cylinder and bulk fleets were recognized for having the lowest vehicle accident frequency rate among the industry's large fleets. This is the fifth consecutive year that Airgas' cylinder fleet has received this honor and the fifth win since 2005 for our bulk fleet. Both awards are outstanding accomplishments for our team of 5,200 professional drivers who, in 2013, drove more than 130 million miles to provide safe and reliable service to our more than 1 million customers.

Personal Safety

Safety comes first in all of our operations. Airgas believes that safety is every associate's responsibility, and it shows in our improved safety track record this year.

Energy

Electricity: Across all of Airgas, we seek out opportunities to make our fill plants and branches more energy efficient. In fiscal 2014, high efficiency lighting projects at a number of sites reduced their electricity usage by 9 to 12 percent.

Diesel fuel: Building on our use of specialized static routing and logistic software, our bulk gas business is now implementing a customer demand forecasting and dynamic routing application to improve customer service and reduce fuel consumption.

When this software is fully deployed and tied into our trucks' on-board computers and telemetry units—which enable real time, or near real time, vision of the customer's inventory level to ensure timely and efficient deliveries—we expect to reduce customer service interruptions by 50 percent and reduce total miles and associated diesel fuel consumption by 3 percent.

In fiscal 2014, we increased the number of Airgas diesel-engine trucks outfitted with Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) technology by 37 percent. Nearly 2,300 trucks in our fleet now include this technology, which reduces emissions of NOX and other diesel-exhaust pollutants.

Waste

At the local level, Airgas sites continually look for opportunities to reuse, reduce and recycle. We are accomplishing this in many different ways: recycling water and paper, cardboard and plastic waste, and selling lime byproduct to companies that use it to reduce sulfur emissions.

Products and Services

Recognizing the importance of recycling or properly disposing of used refrigerants, Airgas continues to invest in technology and services that encourage industry compliance with EPA regulations for ozone-depleting chemicals. Our ReKlaim® drop-off program and our Used Refrigerant Collection service provide contractors with a method to easily return used refrigerants while consolidating freight shipments back to reclamation sites.

Both of these programs support RefrigatronTM, Airgas' patent-pending technology, which streamlines refrigerant reclamation. This past year we reclaimed refrigerants with global warming potential totaling almost 1.7 million metric tons of CO₂ (equivalent), equal to taking nearly 350,000 passenger vehicles off the road.

Social Responsibility

For the sixth year, Airgas and its associates continued our support of Operation Homefront, a charity that supports America's service members by providing emergency assistance and support to families of deployed service members and to those returning home wounded.

To help remedy the shortage of skilled welding labor, as well as support the economy and communities in Airgas' hometown, Airgas has partnered with the A. Philip Randolph Career and Technical High School in Philadelphia in support of their burgeoning welding education program and the development of future welders.