A leading manufacturer and marketer of tissue, packaging, paper, building products and related chemicals, Georgia-Pacific was accepted to the VPP Corporate Pilot after a comprehensive program evaluation of the company's safety and health management systems at its headquarters in Atlanta. The evaluation included key aspects of Georgia-Pacific's safety and health policies, programs and records, and interviews with senior managers and executives.

Key to the company’s approval, according to OSHA, was the strength of its internal prescreening processes to ensure VPP readiness of Georgia-Pacific locations prior to submitting an application and prior to OSHA conducting the onsite evaluation.

"We congratulate Georgia-Pacific on being our first partner accepted to the VPP Corporate Pilot," said OSHA Administrator John Henshaw. "They have demonstrated the strong management systems needed to support the tenets of VPP.

The VPP Corporate Pilot program was designed to streamline the VPP application and onsite evaluation processes for corporations that have made a commitment to VPP. The initiative also focuses on eliminating redundancy in the application requirements for sites from the same corporation.

Five additional corporations and the U.S. Postal Service are also applying to become VPP Corporate Pilot members.