With the growth of the businesses and number of assets over the past several years, one of our focus areas has been on working towards a consistent approach to environmental management and standards across our operations.
In FY15, we formed a new Group-wide Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) team, with HSE leads working in each region across the Group. This has allowed for the sharing of knowledge and experience from each region and the development of new company-wide standards and initiatives. This is one of many consolidations supported by our Operational Excellence business function to provide improvements and consistency in our operations through benchmarking, best practice and quality management.
As well as driving simplification, standardisation and consistency across these functions, the new integrated team will support an operating culture developed and led by Transurban leaders. The Operational Excellence and HSE teams will also set clear operational HSE requirements and provide technical expertise into the business.
In FY15, we began developing a new three-year Strategic Environment Plan to drive compliance, awareness, operational sustainability and continuous improvement. The plan includes key leading and lagging indicators in each area to monitor progress on our strategic objectives.
This includes a national environment compliance audit program to coordinate the various compliance audits completed at each of our assets at regular intervals, and a further program of internal environmental audits to maintain performance and identify further opportunities for improvement.
We have also started regional Environmental Management System (EMS) reviews to ensure that we continue to pursue best practice environmental management.
This EMS review has allowed us to identify effective practices in each region that can be implemented Group-wide to increase consistency, and share knowledge and experience.
National environmental awareness training is being implemented to provide a consistent baseline of understanding to employees in each region. This includes formal environmental training sessions and presentations, as well as on site ‘toolbox talks’ for site-specific environmental management.
We have also set targets to encourage environmental observations among the required monthly ‘HSE Observations’ tracked in our incident reporting system. As with safety observations, these environmental observations are KPIs for all people leaders, and act as a leading indicator to drive increased awareness and discussion of environmental risks, impacts and opportunities.