Sustainability Report 2006/07Encouraging sustainable behaviour
LivingSmart
Melbourne Water’s LivingSmart program is designed to educate and involve our people in living and working sustainably.
A review of the program carried out this year found that 89% of employees surveyed said their personal sustainability performance had improved through Melbourne Water’s education and influence. This figure was unchanged from last year.
Our people completed EPA Victoria’s ecological footprint for the third year in June 2008. The ecological footprint is a measure of the resources used by individuals. The average ecological footprint was recorded at 5.7 global hectares. This compares with 6.3 in June 2007 and 6.9 in June 2006. Some 170 of our people undertook the survey this year, slightly less than last year.
Office-based initiatives
This year, our focus was on sustainability in the office following the introduction of corporate targets (key performance indicators) for reducing our consumption of paper, water, energy and waste. The paper consumption target was included in our employees’ Enterprise Agreement this year. Water, energy and waste will be in the Enterprise
Agreement from 2008/09 and our performance in meeting these targets will be considered when determining salary increases.
For information on our corporate water consumption, see Water, page 12.
Teams of volunteer employees ran education campaigns to build awareness and provide leadership in our efforts in each of these four consumption areas.
We met our corporate target for paper but disappointingly, we didn’t achieve our targets in other areas including water use, despite effective systems being in place. From this year, all greenhouse gas emissions from office energy use and travel were offset. Some 7900 tonnes CO2e of offsets were purchased in the form of New South Wales Greenhouse Abatement Certificates.
Paper
Total paper consumption was 8893 reams (A4 equivalent), a slight increase from the 8248 reams used last year. But on a full-time equivalent (FTE) basis, we achieved a result of 10.3 reams of paper/FTE/year compared with 10.7 reams last year.
Calculations for Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) include all our employees plus all contractors, consultants, trainees, secondees and any other people who utilise resources at a Melbourne Water site.
Energy
We introduced a range of measures to reduce our office-based energy consumption including automatic shutdown of computers at 8pm and office lights at 7.30pm, but failed to improve on our 2006/07 result of 4.4 megawatt hours per FTE or meet our target of 4.3 megawatt hours per FTE per year. Our result was 4.6 MWh per FTE per year.
We undertook an energy audit of our East Melbourne office to look for areas of improvement. Recommendations are being reviewed from this audit and further audits of other selected Melbourne Water sites are planned for 2008/09.
Waste
We commissioned three waste audits at our sites this year. Two-thirds of total waste was recycled compared with 73% last year. However, 92.5% had the potential to be reused or recycled using systems in place at Melbourne Water. We improved our signage as one of several measures to improve recycling and reduce waste to landfill.
From the audits, about 60.3kg of total waste was produced per FTE (55kg last year), and waste to landfill was 19.5kg per FTE per year, well above our target of 14.4 kg/FTE/year.
The 2006/07 baseline was calculated as a result of a one-day audit in June 2006. Increased auditing this year has enabled a more comprehensive assessment of Melbourne Water’s office waste practices, leading to a new and higher baseline for 2008/09 and beyond.
Transport
This year, our people (excluding contractors and consultants) used 1.13 million litres of unleaded, LPG and diesel fuels, equivalent to 3,136 tonnes of CO2e. Our people travelled a total of 9.62 million kilometres, equivalent to 13,577 kilometres per FTE per year. This is a moderate reduction from last year when employees travelled a total of 9.67 million kilometres (15,000 kilometres per FTE).
Melbourne Water has 331 vehicles in our fleet, including 30 Toyota Prius fuel-efficient hybrid cars, which are used mostly in the field.
This year we worked on increasing the safety profile of our fleet by encouraging our people to choose vehicles with a higher safety rating from the Australasian New Car Assessment Program.
Purchasing
We continued our membership of ECO-Buy, a Victorian Government-funded organisation established to encourage the purchasing of green products, and continued to focus on sustainable procurement of products, materials and services purchased by Melbourne Water. Members of Melbourne Water’s supply team took part in a training workshop with ECO-Buy, and a review of our Sustainable Procurement Policy has begun.
We have introduced more sustainable purchasing and production practices into our communication and marketing activities, selecting suppliers on their sustainable practices and selecting only paper and other merchandise products that are highly recyclable or made from recycled materials. We also ensure there is a business need for such products before making the decision to produce them.
Incentives for alliances
Sustainability performance is one of five key result areas that Melbourne Water is introducing in an incentive system for our Pipelines Alliance. This performance will be based on several factors including site condition before and after construction, and resources used in construction.
The other key result areas are delivery (meeting project specifications), value, stakeholder engagement and culture. High levels of environmental and safety performance can also attract bonuses.
It is intended to introduce the incentive system to all four alliance programs in 2008/09.