Taking Steps into Company Footprints

Organisations globally are facing increasing pressure from both governments and the public to reduce their carbon footprint. The challenge is how to effectively report carbon intensities, monitor abatement initiatives and meet regulatory requirements. Three large Australian companies – Amcor, PaperlinX and Foster’s  – are finding that EnviroChart helps them do all that.

News from EnviroChart (2 October 2009):

Organisations globally are facing increasing pressure from both governments and the public to reduce their carbon footprint. The challenge is how to effectively report carbon intensities, monitor abatement initiatives and meet regulatory requirements. Three large Australian companies – Amcor, PaperlinX and Foster’s  – are finding that EnviroChart helps them do all that.

“EnviroChart has become the leading data capture and reporting platform to help large commercial organisations meet the mandatory Government energy reporting requirements, as well as providing the ideal tool for companies to produce excellent sustainability and resource efficiency reports, “ said Eshell Baron, General Manager of EnviroChart.

“Reducing your carbon footprint (and identifying cost savings) makes good business sense”, Baron says.  “Companies that manage their environmental performance, promote good corporate citizenship and long term sustainability, outperform their peers.”

“With Australia’s ongoing Government reporting requirements and increasing public pressure for companies to reduce and offset carbon emissions, EnviroChart offers a powerful, independent reporting solution suitable for any business wishing to track its impact on the environment.”

EnviroChart is suitable for both large corporations and medium size businesses wishing to track their resource consumption, environmental metrics and waste. Customers include leading ASX 50 companies.

Baron says EnviroChart has gained real credibility in the marketplace. “It is a powerful, highly configurable data capture and reporting system that differentiates itself through the unique combination of rich features, smart interface and tailored support.”

Features include unlimited users/sites, easy customisations for statutory and/or company reporting requirements, dashboards, integration with any third party system such as SAP, OSCAR support, audit, variance reporting and much more.

Within an organisation, EnviroChart is the primary repository for important environmental metrics. The data is easily customised to meet any government or internal reporting requirements via a configurable dashboard.

Compliance and reporting requirements become increasingly more difficult as company operations are dispersed across multiple sites, states and countries. Concerns include onerous government reporting obligations and the responsibilities placed on OHS & E departments to provide accurate and timely data for compliance purposes.

As a major user of energy, Amcor has established and implemented programs to deliver reductions in energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions. This includes the company’s involvement in a number of emission trading schemes worldwide.

Today, EnviroChart is used by Amcor and its business groups to manage, capture and report energy, waste and water data, providing Amcor with a snapshot of its carbon footprint and energy efficiency at any given time, location or region.

John Newton, Group Manager Sustainability & Environment, Amcor Australasia says that EnviroChart:

“Makes it simple for us to capture and report energy data on a site as well as a regional basis, and meet all requirements for our mandatory reporting.”

EnviroChart offers a simple yet detailed management tool for reporting utilisation data, carbon intensities and abatement projects in a secure dashboard like manner.

“EnviroChart also highlights for us efficiency opportunities for energy, water and waste.  We get the information we need to act on and we can also measure the success of our actions,” says Newton.

Another user of EnviroChart – for the past three years – is Australia’s premier paper producer PaperlinX.

Andrew Jackson, Group General Manager, Environment, Safety and Health is convinced of the value of EnviroChart as it enables PaperlinX to not only to collect all the data required for compliance reports like NGERS, but also to produce its own Sustainability Report.

“What I like most about EnviroChart is the built-in flexibility, enabling us to add and adapt it to meet all our data collecting and reporting needs,” Jackson says.

For example, it allows PaperlinX to discover energy efficiency opportunities, both to meet Federal and State Government requirements, as well as to see where the company can achieve genuine efficiencies.

EnviroChart was an essential part of the company-wide audit process that enabled PaperlinX to get Government “Greenhouse Friendly” approval for Australia’s first carbon neutral paper, ENVI.

For Paperlinx, EnviroChart allows it to measure and manage all the essential data types, including energy, waste, water and all aspects of production of its paper products.

For Foster’s, who have been utilising EnviroChart since the beginning of this year, it provides an easy-to-use and user-friendly way to handle full environmental reporting for the company from all its sites and for all environmental metrics.

Tanya Atherton, Global Environment Facilitator for Foster’s says they started with EnviroChart as a pilot project involving four sites. It worked so well that Foster’s then trained its people at 108 sites to use EnviroChart.

“It’s very user-friendly, so our EnviroChart training went very smoothly and we got everyone on board very quickly.”

“Useability is the word I use to describe EnviroChart,” says Atherton, who has also found it easy to not only add new sites into the system but also add additional metrics to be measured.

It goes beyond enabling Foster’s to report its mandatory measurements and metrics, to provide a very handy tool to give the company information it needs for its own monthly reporting and for its annual and sustainability reports.

EnviroChart is a single centralised system solution used to:

• Track sustainability metrics
• Increase compliance assurance
• Minimise risk and reduce compliance costs
• Report by site or across the enterprise
• Integrate with company ERP systems
• Import data from ERP systems or utilities
• Identify, target and achieve efficiency objectives
• Provide savings for both: (a) the environment; and (b) the organisation

There is no limit to the number of data types available as additional data types can be created where required. The standard data types handled by EnviroChart are listed below:

Energy: Electricity, LP Gas, Natural Gas, Oil, Steam, Coal, Diesel

Waste: General Solid, Hazardous Solid, Hazardous Liquid, Recycled solid (internal and external)

Water: Purchase and Discharge

Production: Gross, Wastage and Net

Each of these data types may be enabled/disabled as applicable on a per site basis.

EnviroChart is a division of Formation Technology Group, a Microsoft Certified high technology service provider located in Melbourne, Australia.

Source: www.envirochart.com.au