Trevor Kletz

Trevor Kletz developed the concept of inherent safety, which holds that industrial processes should be designed to eliminate or reduce hazards at their source—through substitution, minimization, or simplification—rather than relying on added safety equipment. After a long career at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), he became the leading global advocate for this approach.

Kletz spent most of his career at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in Britain, where he became the company's first technical safety advisor following the 1974 Flixborough disaster. He later held academic positions, including a visiting professorship at Loughborough University, and lectured worldwide on process safety.

Kletz authored numerous influential books on industrial safety, including 'Plant Design for Safety: A User-Friendly Approach' and 'Lessons from Disaster: How Organizations Have No Memory and Accidents Recur.' His writings emphasized learning from past incidents and designing processes that are intrinsically safer from the outset.

The 1974 Flixborough chemical plant explosion in the UK, which killed 28 people, helped galvanize Kletz's focus on process safety as a distinct discipline within chemical engineering. His subsequent work at ICI and beyond made inherent safety a globally recognized concept in the chemical and petrochemical industries.