SITA Australia
Telephone 1300 651 116

Ecological Footprint


For the past six years we have calculated the ecological footprint (EF) of our full year’s operations for the business formerly known as WSN Environmental Solutions. This has enabled us to understand better the cumulative environmental impacts arising from our business activities and to measure our progress towards more environmentally sustainable waste services.

The EF measurement, expressed in hectares (ha) includes:

  • the area occupied by our operational sites;
  • land that has been disturbed by the harvesting, manufacture and supply of materials;
  • energy and services used in our operations; and
  • potential future land disturbance due to climate change arising from the emission of greenhouse gases.

For 2009-2010, our overall footprint stands at 12,149 HA, down 6% on 2008-2009 and 58% on 2004-2005. This performance improvement was largely achieved through our increased gas capture from our network of landfills and our increased production of green electricity that we exported to the NSW Energy Grid.

These outcomes are positive, but of course there is more work to do. We have measures in place that will further reduce our carbon footprint, including:
  • improved gas capture at the Eastern Creek 2 landfill;
  • extensions to gas infrastructure at Macarthur Resource Recovery Park; and
  • increased energy generation at the Macarthur EcolibriumTM Mixed Waste facility as its operation scales up.

Shared Responsibility Model for Measurement

Our choice was to use a shared responsibility model for measuring the ecological footprint of WSN. This model assumes that impacts generated from both WSN’s supply chain and business operations are divided between WSN, customers and supply chain.

This approach reduces multiple counting of impacts and provides a more accurate representation of the footprint WSN generated through its own operations. In 2009-2010, however, WSN's ecological footprint could not be calculated externally, due to external factors, and so a complete evaluation of upstream contributions was not possible. On account of this, those contributions were assumed to be the same as the previous year - a conservative approach considering the contributions have previously decreased significantly year-to-year over the last six years.