BALANCING ACT

CSIRO Balancing Act—A triple bottom line analysis of the Australian economy

Sustainability is a Balancing Act

Australians – in the community, industry and Government – are becoming increasingly concerned with ‘sustainability’. Many individuals and businesses want to be more ‘sustainable’ but don’t know where to start. One of the key barriers is the lack of hard data to guide production and consumption decisions.

It we are to become more sustainable as a nation, we need to understand what lies behind the dollars and cents we spend every day. We need to understand the environmental, social, and economic—or ‘Triple Bottom Line’ – impacts of our consumption and integrate this into our decision making.

This report is based on Australia wide data, with state specific information not available.

Values above the red line are below average and are considered to be negative, whilst values closer to the centre from the red line are above average results.

For further information, please download at www.cse.csiro.au/research/balancingact

The Extractive Industries

The extractive industries are covered under the ‘Other Mining’ Sector which consists of sand and gravel mining (22%), construction materials (44%), and mining of gemstones, silica and talc (34%).

Current turnover is around $3 billion, and involves over 400 enterprises. The sector contributes 0.36% of GDP. Against the metric of one dollar of final demand, the environmental indicators of greenhouse emissions, water use and land disturbance, are respectively 40%, 70% and 95% below average.

The social indicators of employment generation and income are 40% and 35% below average respectively, while Government revenue is 40% above average. The financial indicator of operating surplus is 25% above average, export propensity is 40% above average, and import penetration is equal to average.

Increasing reuse of defunct building materials, new types of cement and new housing designs to reduce embodied emissions may reduce the requirement for sector products.

In summary, this information is presented as a spider diagram above. This is a reasonable triple bottom line account, save for three outliers of employment generation, income and Government revenue. Part of this is due to the large and physically efficient machinery used for mass material movement within the sector, which requires relatively few operators.

Without the strong driver of population growth, and apart from some regional growth centres, the building stock dynamics will have moved into equilibrium with the population dynamics.

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