Waste management

The materiality assessment Downer conducted in 2021 reinforced that waste management is an important issue to Downer. Downer has provided its waste data in several different ways this year, including a breakdown by waste type, waste performance by industry and waste performance by country. The waste types consist of two main types:

Construction and demolition 

This category includes our Australian Infrastructure Projects business, New Zealand Hawkins business, Road pavements (reclaimed asphalt) business within the Road Services Business Unit, and all construction and demolition waste.

Commercial and Industrial

This category consists of:

• Facilities Management, which includes sites where Downer is responsible for procuring the waste services under Facilities Management contracts but has less control over the waste generation (for example, hospitals and schools)
• Industrial Sites, which includes businesses where the waste is generated by our own operations, including our Road Services (non-construction), Rail and Transit Systems, Utilities and Mineral Technologies Business Units.

Mining is not included in this year’s data due to the sale of Open Cut Mining East business, on 17 December 2021. The sale of Open Cut Mining East completed the sale of Downer’s Mining business.

The data provided covers approximately 80 per cent by spend of solid waste and recycling contractors for Commercial and Industrial waste in Australia and New Zealand. The Construction and Demolition waste data has been calculated using actual data from projects that make up 27 per cent by revenue and extrapolated to cover 100 per cent of projects across Australia and New Zealand.

In the "Breakdown of waste performance by industry" table, Construction and Demolition waste makes up 97.55 per cent of Downer’s waste generation, while Commercial and Industrial waste accounts for 2.45 per cent. Construction and Demolition has the highest diversion rate due to the waste being more readily reusable or recyclable (for example, reclaimed asphalt from the Road Services business). Commercial waste tends to be more comingled, organic, and paper, while Industrial tends to have a higher content of non-recyclable waste from engineering and maintenance activities.

In FY22, Downer’s operational (Commercial and Industrial) diversion from landfill rate was 22.30 per cent, an increase of 1.40 per cent when compared to FY21. However, with the inclusion of Construction and Demolition waste, Downer’s diversion from landfill increased significantly to 97.26 per cent. This was driven by the higher percentage of reusable/recyclable options available for Construction and Demolition waste (for example, concrete, steel and fill material).

The ‘Waste performance by country’ table below demonstrates the waste generation split between Downer's Australia and New Zealand operations. New Zealand’s performance remained consistent with previous years, with a small increase of 0.05 per cent from 24.17 per cent in FY21 to 24.22 per cent in FY22. The Australian performance (for Commercial and Industrial waste only) increased by 1.38 per cent from 19.77 per cent to 21.15 per cent in FY22.

This improvement can be attributed to Downer’s primary waste contractor, Cleanaway, implementing improvement projects identified from site audits conducted over the past 12 months. To drive further improvements, Downer has set a target of five per cent improvement by Business Unit for the remaining 12 months of the Cleanaway contract in FY23.

In FY22, Downer continued to look for innovative solutions to reduce the amount of waste we generate through resource recovery, avoidance, reuse and recycling.

One example is an innovative solution by Downer’s Facilities business in Kwinana, Western Australia. The team was left with a large number of leftover hard hats and safety glasses after demobilising from a project. The hard hats cannot be recycled using the usual process, so rather than throwing out the excess hard hats, the team engaged Terracycle, a company that recycles hard plastics into functional products such as park benches and plastic watering cans.

In New Zealand, Downer teams collected their old apparel as part of a uniform re-brand and PPE upgrade, and sent it away to be re-purposed into furniture for children. Downer will now trial a program for general PPE and corporate clothing in our Tauranga office and depot before considering a nationwide rollout. We expect this will result in a reduction in carbon emissions of 15 tCO2-e per year.

Members of our New Zealand team also participated in Circularity’s XLABs program, which looks at how to apply circular economy thinking across the business and build partnerships to help create better circular economies.

 * Construction was calculated in FY22 due to improvements in data collection.

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