The link between sustainability and business performance

There’s been an exciting shift in sustainability in the past five years - businesses have realised there’s no disconnect between good environmental management and business performance. We help these businesses integrate environmental and other business activities to reap productivity increases and reduced costs - all the while improving our sustainability.

The Sustainability Advantage Program helps medium to large organisations improve their environmental performance in a way that adds business value. This holistic program helps businesses tackle their impact on the environment and respond to the increasing pressures of climate change, community expectations and the preference of corporate and government customers to deal with sustainable businesses.

I’ve seen a definite change in the way businesses think about sustainability. In the past, only one person in a business may have had responsibility for environmental issues. Now we’re starting to see it treated more like OHS, where the issue is owned by a number of people across the business. This means everyone has a clearer idea of what their responsibility is, so it’s more likely to succeed.

The reality of doing business is that competitive advantage and cost savings are generally the major motivator. In the end though, motivations aren’t important as long as they lead to environmental improvements. We appreciate that people have massively different motivations and our job is to tap into them to effect positive changes.

We favour working with businesses that already have a degree of commitment to sustainability. This is because we’re spending public money with these organisations and want to ensure there’s a certain level of commitment. Businesses pledge to work with us for at least 18 months, which begins with a two-hour sustainability management diagnostic.

This diagnostic needs to be done with the organisation’s leadership team so that sustainability is owned ‘at the top’ and by people across the entire business. They look at areas that are going well in terms of environmental management and identify areas that need more work in the future. As a result, businesses themselves identify an agenda they want to pursue and we support them to accelerate it.

The focus of our support is in the key sustainability areas of: vision and planning; resource efficiency; environmental risk and responsibility; supply chain; climate change; staff engagement and training; and external stakeholder engagement.

Businesses contribute $3000 when they join but can get as much as $15,000-$20,000 of service support out of the program. To date, participating businesses have gone on to reap a range of benefits, including:

• A strategic understanding of sustainability benefits and business priorities.
• Cost savings associated with resource efficiency.
• Better staff engagement and productivity.
• Marketing advantages and becoming a supplier of choice.

The most obvious savings seen as a result of the program have been in resource efficiency, with the biggest savings coming from the building products sector.

For example, the Austral Brick Company has improved the sizing of its machines and driers and more tightly manages compressed air leaks, which delivered $112,000 in savings over 2007-08. Improvements to lighting layout and technology and power factor correction have delivered another $45,000 in savings a year and the business is enjoying $20,000 in water savings each year. Finally, Austral now re-uses all of the waste generated during manufacture.

Agribusiness is another cluster that has seen large savings as a result of participating in the Sustainability Advantage Program. De Bortoli Wines now re-uses all of its wastewater for growing forage crops, which generates $200,000 income each year on top of the power savings achieved by diverting 150 tonnes of waste from landfill.

We’re here to help businesses prosper and grow into the future. Some businesses don’t know where to start when it comes to sustainability and we help them unscramble the puzzle, embed environmental management into their business processes and reap the financial benefits that come from world-class sustainability practices.

* David Trewin is Manager of Business Partnerships at the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water NSW. He has 20 years’ experience in environmental management, education and public relations. He has a strong commitment to continuing education and is currently completing a Master of Environmental Management at the University of NSW.