Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities Annual Report 2011–12

Environmental performance

The department did this by:

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  fostering a culture of environmental responsibility at work, including mandatory online environmental training for new staff and online Green at Work information for all staff
  
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  providing environmental training for regional and remote area field staff, scientists and support staff in sound environmental management practices in Antarctica, World Heritage Areas, national parks and reserves
  
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  promoting efficient use of energy, water, paper and other natural resources
  
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  preventing or minimising pollution, waste-to-landfill and greenhouse gas emissions
  
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  favouring the purchase of more sustainable goods and services in line with the Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines ‘whole-of-life costing’ requirements
  
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  fulfilling our local, national and international legal and other obligations relating to environmental management
  
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  developing and implementing environmental management plans that identify and address significant environmental risks and opportunities for environmental improvement at all sites
  
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  monitoring and reporting on our environmental performance, both internally and externally.
  

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  enhanced sustainability reporting and benchmarking by combining environmental reporting data from the three main office locations of the department
  
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  information and communications technology improvements to reduce overall energy consumption for the department
  
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  participation by a number of state/territory offices in Earth Hour 2012
  
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  a coordinated business clean up day across a range of sites and states in support of Clean Up Australia Day.
  

The department has Environmental Management Systems (EMS) for the operations of our main Canberra offices and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). Both Environmental Management Systems were externally audited this financial year and the department succeeded in obtaining continued three-year certification to the international standard for environmental management systems (ISO14001:2004) for both the AAD EMS and the Canberra EMS.

The department completed an ambitious Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Refresh project in March 2012. This refresh included the replacement of its entire fleet of aged and inefficient desktop computers. Seventy-three per cent of the old computers were replaced with very low footprint thin client devices, with the remainder being replaced by desktop PCs with considerably reduced power consumption. It is anticipated that the percentage of services delivered through the thin-client devices will continue to increase over time.

The refresh also replaced the printer and photocopier fleet with considerably fewer energy efficient multi-function devices with swipe-to-print technology. The benefits of this investment have begun to be realised in this year’s energy and paper consumption results with many offices showing a decline in total energy use and paper use. The department’s vision and cutting edge work resulted in the receipt of an international IT Ecosolutions Award from HP Australia for the Asia-Pacific region for the significant improvements in our environmental footprint.

The department has an active Environmental Contact Officer Network (ECONet). These staff volunteers in conjunction with the local environmental performance managers/teams continue to provide leadership, ideas and initiatives such as tours of recycling facilities and tree planting to support and promote a culture of environmental responsibility.

The department is continuing to improve our sustainability reporting and is participating in an Australian Government sustainability reporting pilot initiative using the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework as a base for reporting. One of the key aims of this initiative is to improve the comparability of government agencies’ reporting about organisational sustainability. As a result, new indicators have been used in this year’s report that are not directly comparable with previous years’ annual reports.

Table 3 presents a comprehensive overview of the environmental impacts resulting from the department’s office based operations. This includes the activities of around 1614 staff in our three main offices in Canberra, 323 staff in the Australian Antarctic Division offices in Kingston, Tasmania and 58 staff in the Supervising Scientist Division and Parks Australia offices in Darwin and Jabiru. The department undertakes considerable work in non-office based environments. Environmental impacts from these operations are reported separately later in this chapter.

Table 4: Summary of environmental indicators