Environment

At Orica we understand that good environmental performance is essential to the ongoing success of our business, and our social licence to operate.

Orica owns and operates extremely complex facilities that provide significant benefits to many Australian businesses and consumers. We aspire to the highest environmental standards and work to embed environmental stewardship in everything we do. We consider the short-term and long-term impacts of our operations on the environment and throughout our operations across all of our sites as we work to minimise our environmental footprint. Improvement projects are regularly undertaken onsite to ensure our environmental performance continues to meet the standards expected by the community, regulatory bodies and Orica. We are committed to ensuring that all operations are conducted in accordance with our Environment Policy. The Protection of the Environment (Operations) Act 1997 requires facilities such as ours to hold an Environment Protection Licence (EPL). This licence includes the emission limits, monitoring and reporting requirements, and the environmental improvement programs that our Kooragang Island facility must comply with. The EPL includes pollution reduction programs, which are being implemented to improve the site’s environmental performance.

Although the Kooragang Island site achieves a compliance rate of more than 99.5 percent against the monitoring requirements, any non-compliance is treated very seriously. Orica investigates any breach to enable appropriate controls to be put in place to minimise the risk of recurrence, and shares findings as part of our ongoing learnings across our business.

Orica is also required to report emissions on an annual basis in the National Pollution Inventory (NPI). This information includes a combination of measured emissions and estimates based on government-developed emission factors. The NPI reports are available at the National Pollutant Inventory website.

Sustainability and social responsibility are integral to our decision-making throughout the organisation, globally, to ensure the continued delivery of value to stakeholders in the key areas of governance, safety, health and environment, product stewardship, people, community engagement and communication. Our focus across these areas is key to ensuring our social licence to operate.

Information about Orica’s sustainability activities, and the actions we are taking to continue to improve our operations are detailed in our annual sustainability report.

General licence requirements