Environmental sustainability

THE THINKING BEHIND OUR INDICATORS

In addition to measuring our performance in our projects, like many organisations, we have also designed indicators that monitor our operations at an organisational level.

The Government has issued sustainability guidelines with which all its agencies must comply. While our small size and legal structure (a State-owned corporation) means we fall below the compliance threshold for these guidelines, we have voluntarily chosen to meet these requirements and have formalised this commitment by incorporating them into our targets because they represent good sustainability practice.

That said, our ability to achieve them is, in some cases, hampered by factors outside our control. For example, our tenancy agreement limits our ability to effectively measure our water and electricity usage because there is no separate metering. However, we plan to move premises within the next few years and we will take the opportunity to incorporate as many conditions as possible in our future lease contract to ensure that we can improve our performance and meet the targets we have established.

HOW WE PERFORMED

^{Note 1: The number of cartridges used is estimated based on the number of cartridges recycled.}

Water:
Our corporate water target to reduce potable water consumption by 15% by 2010/2011 is in line with the NSW Government’s sustainability strategy. Our current tenancy arrangements and lack of access to separate metering prevent us from monitoring our performance against a baseline.

Energy and greenhouse gas emissions:
The most significant emissions for Landcom are Scope 3 emissions, which as detailed earlier in the report, we try to address through our broader energy and sustainability supply chain indicators.

Our electricity usage increased this year because of the increase in the number of contractors we recruited to deliver homes for Housing NSW as part of the Government’s stimulus package. This expanded workforce meant we took over another office floor in our building. In addition, given the nature of this project, the contractors that were employed needed to work irregular hours, which in simple terms meant that the lights were on for much of the time.

Since contractor numbers fluctuated during the year and their electricity consumption was indistinguishable from that of full-time employees, it was difficult to normalise consumption for the average number of employees over the year. For the purposes of calculating averages, we have used a staff total of 159 people, which includes the contractors temporarily accommodated in our offices throughout the reporting period.

Fleet:
In accordance with the NSW Government’s sustainability policy, all Landcom’s vehicles are required to meet an average annual Vehicle Environmental Performance Score target. This is calculated using a vehicle scoring system adopted for the NSW Clean Car benchmarks, which rates vehicle impacts in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and air quality. The targets for passenger and light commercial vehicles are 13.5/20 and 9.0/20 respectively by the target date of 30 June 2011. At 30 June 2009 the fleet scores were 12.4/20 for passenger vehicles and 8.7/20 for light commercial vehicles. As at 30 June 2010, our average passenger car environmental performance score was 14.2/20 and the average light vehicle environmental performance score was 8.5/20.

Our total fleet greenhouse gas emissions were 29.2 CO2e tonnes. This represents a considerable improvement on the 2004/2005 greenhouse gas emissions from our fleet, which were 52.0 CO2e tonnes. This is due to fleet improvements through greater fuel efficiency and purchase of new, more fuel efficient vehicles.

Carbon neutrality:
A corporate carbon neutral operations indicator for Landcom is being developed, as is another new indicator to reduce our reliance on offsets. The outcome will be a carbon framework to account for, and offset, our greenhouse gas emissions, which we believe will be a considerable step towards achieving carbon neutrality.

Electricity:
All the 574,025 kWh of electricity purchased and consumed by our head and regional offices during the reporting period was GreenPower. This equates to zero carbon emissions for electricity consumption for the year. We offset 31.1 tonnes of our fleet greenhouse emissions through Green Fleet.

Since the reduction of total corporate energy use by 1% annually based on the previous year’s consumption is a new indicator, no result was recorded. The total corporate energy consumption for 2009/2010 was 13.0 GJ per employee.

Waste:
99% of paper purchased for our office operations during the year contained 60% and 80% recycled content. We recycled 12.5 tonnes of office paper. This includes paper purchased, mailed to, and imported into Landcom.

It is worth noting that our paper recycling contractor calculates our paper recycling weight by using a proxy weight per full rubbish bin, and not by measuring the actual paper weight in the bin. Due to the frequency of pickups, many bins, especially those in our smaller offices, may not be full, leading to a likely overestimation of our paper recycling. This means that a target of 100% paper recycling may not represent accurate or indicative information on how well we recycle and discard paper. A more meaningful measure is to report on the number of reams of paper purchased per staff member, with the aim to reduce this over time. This year, our paper purchased equated to 28 A4 equivalent reams per person.

All 198 used toner cartridges, all retired computers and monitors and 0.4 tonnes of co-mingled bottles and cans were recycled. Six faulty laser jet printers were not able to be recycled.

All communications and marketing documents (929 reams) were printed on 100% recycled paper. Landcom also purchased new record files that were carbonneutral and made from 100% recycled material.

Sustainable supply chain:
We did not meet our target of buying appliances with a minimum five star Minimum Energy Performance Standard (MEPS) and Water Efficiency Labelling and Standard (WELS) rating since our purchase of a four star dishwasher was driven by the need to coordinate maintenance with the three existing dishwashers. However, all future purchases will have higher energy efficiency ratings.

Neither did we achieve a 4.5 star rating for our head and regional offices, since our current head office building, which we re-leased this year, does not comply with this rating. The re-lease decision was based on operational, not environmental, considerations. However, environmental performance will be a major factor when deciding on new office accommodation. This decision is likely to be made in the next two to three years.
 

Social sustainability

THE THINKING BEHIND OUR INDICATORS

These indicators are designed to measure our effectiveness in creating a healthy, productive organisational culture. They also assess the training and development programs we have in place, the management of our sustainability stakeholder relationships and the employment opportunities we provide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

To assess employee satisfaction, we conduct a staff survey every two years. The survey helps us understand how engaged and satisfied employees are with the direction we are taking on sustainability and the programs that underpin this direction. Last year, we decided that in future the survey would also incorporate feedback on how employees perceive our sustainability initiatives.

Following stakeholder feedback, we also decided to provide more context and qualitative feedback on our training and development initiatives.

HOW WE PERFORMED

Indigenous opportunities:
In March 2010, Landcom engaged an indigenous person in a position whose scope was developed in partnership with the University of Western Sydney. This position provides career development opportunities for indigenous people who wish to combine study with part or full-time employment. Our intention over the coming year, is to establish a further one to two similar positions.

Training and development:
The focus of our human resources strategy this year was on building and embedding Landcom’s core values of sustainability, problem solving and relationship building into both the culture and the way we do business. Our approach was centred on developing staff ownership of the values by:

• defining the behaviours required to give expression to these values;
• improving management skills in communicating the values;
• communicating them more broadly through the organisation;
• building the values and behaviours into our performance development processes;
• ensuring these were used effectively to manage our people and their performance around the values and behaviours.

Five workshops were held to improve management skills in leading the shift towards a values-based culture, defining the behaviours associated with our values, creating a culture through conversations and reviewing performance development.

To embed our values, we developed an internal communications campaign to give these values life and context, reviewed our performance development processes in line with best practice and, as part of our business improvement program, we held courses on contracts administration.

Other professional development initiatives included a tailored management program aligned with our strategic objectives, aimed at developing property and general management skills and another designed to build teams through effective communication, leadership, relationship building and people management.

We held or attended 47 separate internal and external training courses, seminars and conferences and these events were patronised by a total of 979 attendees. Our training program for the year was divided into the following categories:

Corporate priorities:
Plain English; Record keeping; Effective communication; Dealing with change; OH&S training; Contract and tender management; Planning; and Administrative law.

Business improvement:
Values, Software and IT systems, Policy briefings; Seminars on public housing, accessing government information, freedom of information, ethics in law and disability standards; and induction courses.

Industry/Supply chain sustainability and capacity building:
Sustainability conference and launch of PRECINX©; Landcom Guidelines; Urban development and infrastructure in the Hunter; and sponsorship of a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines workshop.

Employee satisfaction:
Our 2010 Employee Opinion Survey, conducted in April, achieved an employee engagement score of 72%, which is above the Australian average of 69% and only 3% below the gold medal standard. With 96 respondents (representing a 71% response rate, compared with 68% in 2008) the survey ranked, in order of preference, the best things about working for Landcom as being:

1. Challenging work/job satisfaction
2. Work/life balance
3. Fellow employees
4. Good employer

Unlike previous surveys, it provided an industry benchmarking for employee satisfaction.

To measure employee perspectives on our sustainability initiatives, an extra six questions were added. Questions were scored from one to five, with a score of between one and two as negative, three as average and four and five identified as positive. The following results were achieved:

Over the coming year we will introduce specific programs to engage and educate staff about Landcom’s historical interest in sustainability, our achievements over time and our sustainability strategy into the future. This is in recognition of the proportion of staff who have commenced at Landcom in the last 2 years.

Stakeholder relationship management:
Net Balance worked with Landcom over the last year to help us to revise our existing stakeholder engagement strategy so that it is more targeted and deliberate in its approach. We will report our achievements and performance against this strategy in future years. Further information on this is provided in the opening introduction to this report (pp 32-33 refers).

In the meantime, during the reporting period, project staff continued to manage stakeholders through our current stakeholder consultation handbook and Landcom management continued to develop relationships with our major social and environmental stakeholders. We also established regular meetings and forums to help manage those relationships that are critical to the success of our business and continued to play a major role in coordinatinggovernment activity through our projects.

Governance

THE THINKING BEHIND OUR INDICATORS

We continue to disclose our performance in sustainability reporting against the Global Reporting Initiative framework. Our overall operations continued to be measured against the International Standard for Environmental Management Systems (AS/NZS ISO14001:2004).

HOW WE PERFORMED

Global Reporting Initiative:
We have obtained an application level of A+ under the Global Reporting Initiative’s reporting standard this year for our Sustainability Report. This is the highest reporting standard under the Global Reporting Initiative framework.

Environmental Management System:
Landcom’s Environmental Management System was recertified for ongoing use under the AS/NZS ISO14001:2004. Last year’s audit leading up to the recertification was the most comprehensive audit over the last three years.

HOW WE PERFORMED

For more information, refer to financial section within the annual report.