Alluvium
Briefly describe your workplace and business.
Waterway management is our core business and we employ almost 30 professional staff from both science and engineering disciplines. We have over 150 years of combined experience in waterway planning, management and remediation, and our skill disciplines extend to vision setting, waterway morphology, instream habitat, riparian management, flow modelling and recommendations and physical form management.Our business is deliberately different to large and multidisciplinary consulting firms. We choose to only work in our area of technical strength and to only focus on a small number of clients. It is in this space that we endeavour to differentiate ourselves through strong communication and a highly personalised level of service.
What have you done to reduce your CO2 emissions?Consider breaking this down into flights, electricity, gas and vehicle usage.
We have from the onset of the business aimed to reduce our environmental footprint. We deliberately avoided systems such as car salary packaging that continue to reinforce a culture of cars for transport. Instead we actively support bikes and have won the Ride to Work Day award twice for the most staff riding to work in a company under 20 people. We created an office space that utilises natural lighting as much as possible and given the thermal properties of the building there is no need for air conditioning. Many of our clients are based in rural Victoria, NSW and QLD and where possible we use regional trains to service these clients. We are particularly proud of the culture of bike usage and over 80% of our staff ride to work every day.
What plans do you have for future reductions?
We intend to continue a path of minimising our environmental footprint in every aspect of our business
Why have you become Climate Positive?
Being sensitive to carbon emissions is only one of our commitments to sustainability. In every step of our purchasing, operation, and policies we seek the most sustainable outcomes. Our people work in a role where they actively see themselves in repairing and restoring the natural environment and being Climate Positive is another path for us to minimise our footprint and impact.
How have the emissions been offset?
We pursue a two pronged approach for our emission offsetting.1. All our staff are actively involved in tree planting with community groups on public land to offset 50% of our emissions. We see this as an important activity to get our hands dirty with the community members who year in year out continue to revegetate our waterways. We believe this interaction and working side by side helps our people to understand the values of these community people who are so important to helping restore our environment. 2. We also have worked with the not-for-profit group Climate Positive to offset our carbon emissions for a more sustainable future. Climate Positive carefully selects offsets projects that not only reduce carbon emissions but also build renewable energy infrastructure to combat global warming. Climate Positive also believes in building and recreating the natural environment, which is threatened in the face of future climate change, by restoring ecologically diverse forests in high-carbon yield areas. Alluvium and Climate Positive are proudly working together to have a positive impact on global warming.www.alluvium.com.au