Environmental and social responsibility (ERS) management

Intoll - Community

Intoll takes a long-term view of its business activities and believes that many social, environmental and economic benefits arise from responsible management and development of its portfolio of toll road assets.
Intoll acknowledges that with these benefits lies the potential for risk, including environmental and social responsibility risk.
Intoll has adopted a policy and procedures to manage these risks which reflect the risk specifically associated with management of and investment in infrastructure assets. This policy forms part of Intoll’s overarching risk management framework in accordance with Principle 7 of its corporate governance statement.

The framework is applied throughout Intoll’s investment process as follows:

Asset selection – environmental and social responsibilities are reviewed as part of the acquisition due diligence process
Ongoing asset management – regular asset board reporting enables compliance with environmental requirements to be monitored and environmental and social responsibility issues to be identified
Stakeholder reporting – policies, social and environmental initiatives and compliance performance are reported internally and, where appropriate, externally.

In this section we provide details of environmental and social responsibilities and initiatives undertaken during FY2009 at Intoll’s assets.
In addition to Intoll’s own processes and policies, many new infrastructure projects undergo extensive social and environmental impact reviews before being given approval to proceed. The process is typically run by governments, which will have balanced the costs and benefits of the project.

Accordingly, a government-run process will usually require new infrastructure to produce more efficient environmental outcomes than existing alternative infrastructure; or, where an investment is made in existing infrastructure, for that investment to produce improved environmental outcomes over those that existed prior to the investment being approved.

ESR-related regulatory requirements

Intoll is not aware of any material breaches of relevant ESR-related regulatory standards by its assets during the year ended 30 June 2009.

ESR-related initiatives at Intoll assets during FY2009

Westlink M7

Air travel - 0%
Electricity - 97%
Company vehicles - 3%

As a result of the review, Westlink M7 is implementing a staged approach to reducing its emissions and is focusing on three areas, the control centre emissions, vehicle emission, and emissions from the motorway operation.

During the period Westlink M7 engaged environmental consultants Big Switch to develop a carbon reduction strategy at its Eastern Creek control centre. The key focus is on reducing energy consumption at the control centre and identifying opportunities to use renewable energy generation.
To further reduce its carbon footprint, Westlink M7 is making paper-based statements a thing of the past. Customers have embraced this green initiative with many already electing to pay their accounts online. Westlink sends out around 164,000 statements per quarter. Westlink aims to reduce this by 85% – this will save the printing of around 140,000 paper statements per quarter.

Additionally, Westlink M7 supports social responsibility initiatives that reward and recognise leadership in environmental sustainability. In 2008 Westlink was a gold sponsor of the Hills Business & Excellence Awards in the category of Sustainability & Environmental Management.

407 ETR

407 ETR conducted several fundraising events and contributed to numerous local charities during the year. Charitable donations included C$30,000 to the annual SickKids Radiothon, which supports Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, and more than C$95,000 to the United Way, which works to improve local living conditions and to strengthen the local community. 407 ETR also contributed through fundraising to the James Fund and to paediatric brain cancer research, and continues to provide one C$15,000 scholarship to a York University student.

Additionally, over 15 local junior sports teams received sponsorship from 407 ETR during the period, as well as a number of sporting events, including the Rogers Cup Tennis tournament.