Sustainability in what we do and the products we make is central to building for a better tomorrow. We are looking across our business, and working with our customers, to bring sustainable solutions and low carbon products to market.
Our commitment to safety is at the heart of what we do. We believe all injuries are preventable and are committed to our responsibility to get our people home safely every day. Our Safety Leadership Programme (SLP) provides a purpose-built framework for leadership development to enhance safety across the organisation. SLP is facilitated by line managers, bringing credibility to the delivery as they are encouraged to tell their own stories to connect with their teams.
We focus on inclusion and diversity in our business, and are working on fostering an inclusive workplace culture, increasing the representation of women across all parts of the business, maintaining our Rainbow Tick, and increasing leadership opportunities for women, Māori, Pasifika, and indigenous people.
Addressing the issue of gender pay parity remains a key priority. We continue to focus on closing the gap with pay parity improving from 95.7% at the end of FY21 to 96.5% for FY22.
Our door is open to talented employees, or future employees, from all backgrounds. In FY22, nearly 40% of our vacancies were filled internally, showing the positive outcomes of our approach to supporting our people build their careers at Fletcher Building.
To help everyone to get into a great career with us, we have a range of youth development and student scholarships including First Foundation, TupuToa, and other internship and graduate positions. They can all be viewed here.
We also have a responsibility to those who work with us. Our Human Rights Policy and our Supplier Code of Conduct outline how we and our suppliers will ensure ethical treatment of people who work with us. We support labour rights and freedom of association for our people and within in our supply chain, and 26% of our workforce are part of a union and/or covered by collective bargaining agreements. In FY22, we focused on identifying areas with potential risk for forms of modern slavery in our supply chain, completed risk assessments to identify where to focus. We published our second Modern Slavery Statement in December 2021
As a leading building products, construction, and distribution business we take our environmental responsibility seriously. We understand the need to address carbon emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change.
Our commitment to this is why we were first in our industry in Australasia to set a Science-Based Target (SBT) for carbon reduction. We are on track to meet our target of reducing our combined Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 30% by 2030. Our emissions for FY22 were 1.1 million tCO2e which is a 12% reduction from our baseline year of FY18.
We are progressing with reduction plans across all of our business units. Our focus in New Zealand is to continue to reduce coal usage and emissions from cement production, build our new and significantly more energy efficient wallboards plant at Tauriko, and continue the transition from diesel to alternatives in our fleet. Our Australian businesses are working on solar electricity, having completed planning for four major installations that will start construction in FY23.
In FY22, to support the reduction in our Scope 3 emissions, we also provided our major suppliers with tools and resources through the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) to help them to disclose and reduce their carbon emissions.
Our forward plans for further reductions across the business include moving our construction fleet progressively from diesel to hybrid vehicles, continuing to reduce energy in our Australian operations, and the new Winstone Wallboards plant we plan to open in 2023, which will reduce emissions by 10% as well as increase recycled content in the product.
Over the past two years, we have had a clear focus on offering products with sustainability certifications to our customers, playing our part to decarbonise the building sector and supporting our customers’ own sustainability goals. These products are featured in our LowCO house and across our construction projects. Within our product portfolio, revenue from sustainably certified products increased from 49% in FY21 to 61% in FY22 (this is how we calculated it).
We want to be transparent about our performance on environmental and social issues as part of our governance process.
We have reported our emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and we update our sustainability performance to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) each year, and we are pleased to be members of the DJSI Asia-Pacific index.
The FY22 Annual report (PDF) has more detail on how we are achieving our sustainability aims. The safety, environmental and people-related metrics we provide in the annual report reflect the performance of our operations across all markets. This covers our direct operations, and some metrics, such as our greenhouse gas emissions, also include our equity accounted investments such as joint ventures.
We've partnered up with ESG World to provide easy access to reporting on our areas of sustainability (environmental, social and governance), allowing our stakeholder community to monitor our performance and easily identify and access the processes, metrics, initiatives and certifications that underpin our commitment in these areas.
We work within our industry to improve sustainability of products and projects, and we are active members of the following sustainability organisations:
The Sustainable Development Goals are a global set of goals adopted by New Zealand, Australia and all United Nations member states that support strategies to improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests. Fletcher Building’s sustainability aims support the following eight United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
From 2019, our sustainability reporting is part of our Annual Report.
We are committed to promoting a culture of compliance, honesty and ethical behaviour. We want the people who work for us, and those we do business with, to be comfortable approaching the organisation with any concerns about conduct which appears unethical or improper. We provide a confidential service called FBuCall for staff and those we do business with to raise concerns.
FBuCall is a free and anonymous phone and online service. It is managed externally, independently of Fletcher Building.
