Stakeholders

Our stakeholders include our employees, our customers, our suppliers and other contractors, relevant government agencies, local communities in which we operate, and shareholders in our parent company, Wesfarmers Limited.

Response to 2006 Stakeholder Survey

The stakeholder review conducted by URS last year identified the following key sustainability opportunities:

• supply chain - issues concerning timber procurement, general sourcing of products and raising awareness of sustainability within the supply chain;
• OH&S – relating to safety in the store environment encompassing employees, customers and suppliers;
• product stewardship – relating to educating and raising awareness about life cycle impacts of products and sustainable alternatives; and
• resource consumption – water, waste and greenhouse gas were noted as areas of opportunity for improvement.

The key sustainability opportunities identified by stakeholders were generally similar to the ones identified within our business.  These areas are all subject to strategies designed to achieve further improvements in the short term and in the future.

Feedback/Complaints

Our philosophy is to proactively establish open dialogue with our stakeholder groups and encourage feedback and comment as to our performance.

We provide a feedback tool at every location through ‘How Did We Do?’ cards, promoted at the front of the store and our website also provides customers the ability to give feedback online or contact us directly. We received an average of 1,098 responses per month from customers via our website.

We also received 77 written complaints from customers relating to alleged product performance.

Any customer complaints are personally followed up by the complex or store manager or a senior manager as required.

We continue to receive a large number of letters of thanks and appreciation from customers, communities, government agencies and non-government organisations.

We strongly promote an internal culture supporting feedback from our team members across all aspects of our business. A good example of this is project REDeploy, whereby team members actively put forward ideas to reduce administrative tasks within the business to focus the time saved on customer service.

Liaison with authorities

We remain proactive in engaging and establishing open working relationships with authorities that regulate our business and the non-government organisations that take an interest in our operations.

Our participation in the Australian Standards Technical committee for the review of AS3833 for Mixed class storage of Dangerous goods has concluded with the draft standard to be released in late 2007. We also continued our involvement in a joint retail industry and safety regulator working group to develop a national code of practice for safe storage of poisons in retail outlets. A draft proposal has been developed for submission to the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

We have strengthened our relationships with all water authorities around Australia, working on a number of water saving programmes as detailed earlier in the report.

Action groups

We continued an open dialogue with interested parties in the ongoing implementation of our Timber and Wood Products Purchasing policy, including the Greenpeace and WWF Australia organisations regarding forest practices in the Asia-Pacific region.

We worked closely with Jon Dee the founder of Planet Ark to support the Australian launch of the ‘6 Tips to Save the Environment’ leaflet, part of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” campaign.

During the year we received concerns from customers and a wildlife conservation group about the impact on animals of certain products we sell (specifically rodent traps and anti-bird netting). In consultation with the RSPCA we reviewed glue board and metal-toothed rodent traps and monofilament anti-bird netting and we have decided to delete these products from our range.

Communication

Newsletters and reports

A wide variety of internal and external mediums are used to effectively communicate to our stakeholders.

Internally we produce both a Community Report Card and a Health and Safety Report Card to ensure environmental, sustainability and health and safety issues are kept top of mind for our team members. These reports are also posted on our website for our stakeholders to view.

Our strategic objectives, such as the Climate Change strategy, are communicated via internal DVDs, newsletters and meetings to our team members.

Our in-house magazine, ‘Bunnings Banter’ recognises team and individual performance within the community and environment and helps to reinforce our culture.

We have assisted with the publication of two sustainable living booklets in Handyman magazine – the Energy Smart booklet (April 2007) and the Water Smart booklet (July/August 2007).

Externally, we are continuing to communicate to customers on market-leading trends such as water saving and energy saving techniques via advertising as well as in-store ‘How to’ workshops, ‘How to’ brochures, and information on our website as detailed earlier in the report. We also sponsored television programmes ‘Eco Challenge’ (SBS) and the ‘Great Water Challenge’ (Channel 7).

Website

Our website www.bunnings.com.au includes information about our operations for the community, including environmental, safety and health information relating to our business. It also provides an effective tool to engage customers on reducing environmental impact through sustainable living and product choices.

We have received over 94,000 hits on our community and sustainability web pages from customer seeking information on our activities in this area.

We regularly feature sustainability market trends such as water saving, energy saving and recycling ideas on our homepage.

This year our New Zealand website was relaunched and the Australian website now contains more regional-specific information. These innovations allow us to tailor our content to best meet the needs of local markets.

Community support

We receive and grant many requests for financial, labour and material assistance from a wide spectrum of charitable organisations, sporting bodies and schools. Our community involvement focuses primarily on local organisations and we also support regional and national organisations. During the year, we helped raise funds and contributed more than $8 million to various charities and community groups throughout Australia and New Zealand. We also made a huge contribution to community projects through the high number of paid and volunteer team member hours dedicated to these projects.

At a local level we support many community groups and activities operating in the areas of family, community and sustainability.

Local community groups are provided with a valuable fund raising opportunity by conducting sausage sizzles at the front of our stores. These sausage sizzles are enjoyed by thousands of our customers each weekend and raised over $4 million in the past year for the community groups that held them.

Our team members have continued to donate their own time to participate in local community beautification projects. Many of these projects have had a sustainability focus, for example the building of a water wise garden at a local primary school.

One example of the thousands of diverse activities we undertake across our network comes from New Zealand where Support Office team members have been donating their own time to help with the running of Special Olympics events, including swimming and athletics events in Auckland. The team members helped as board keepers, time keepers, marshals and wherever a helping hand was needed to make the events a success.

Our team members in Australia and New Zealand also answered the call for assistance from the Australian Red Cross and the New Zealand Blood Service. With a decline in donors and a real shortage of blood, team members from our stores throughout the network and from support offices have volunteered to regularly donate and help address the shortage. 

At each of our warehouse stores free DIY clinics are offered to adults and children. In addition, specially coordinated ‘Ladies Nights’ and ‘Ladies Days’ are conducted to introduce women to a range of DIY projects. Children’s workshops are also conducted at schools, community centres and major community events.

Each of our warehouse stores has a dedicated activity organiser with the role of managing store activities and local community involvement.

Another way we support our local communities is through our Community Fun Day programme where various community groups, youth groups and service organisations are invited to hold information displays and conduct activities at one of our warehouse stores on a weekend.

On the Community Fun Day our stores provide a variety of free family activities such as face painting, jumping castles, clowns and petting zoos. At the completion of the day, donation cheques for up to $1,000 are drawn and presented to five lucky organisations represented.

This year we were proud to support the following programmes within Australia:

• DIY workshops – Water saving weekend (21/22 April), Phillips CFL Globe programme (NSW), Grey Water workshops, and National Composting Week workshops;
• support of media consumer awareness programmes – The Great Water Challenge (Seven Network), Eco House Challenge (SBS), Jon Dee’s ‘6 Ways to Save the Environment and Your Wallet’ awareness campaign;
• support of Government initiatives – WA International Compost Week, NSW – ‘It’s a Living Thing’ programme;
• Bendigo Blitz - During August 2006 we held our Annual Management Conference in Bendigo, Victoria. The conference was attended by 420 of our managers from Australia and New Zealand representing stores, trade facilities, support centres and the senior management team. Part of our culture is to contribute to the local communities in which we operate so it was decided that we would demonstrate this at that conference by engaging with the Bendigo community. The Bendigo Council was approached and they put forward several community projects. Five projects were chosen and a variety of work was completed at the Community Centre at White Hills Botanic Gardens, the Friends of Kennington Reservoir as well as two Neighbourhood Renewal Projects and a roadside clean up project;
• volunteer Fire-fighters - Throughout January 2007, we and Dulux donated a total of five dollars from every can of Wash & Wear 101 or Weathershield paint purchased from Warehouse stores to the Australasian Fire Authorities Council for volunteers’ fire safety training. This year’s campaign raised an additional $230,000, taking the total amount raised since the campaign launched in 2003 to over
  $1 million donated to fire volunteers across Australia. The funds raised allow fire fighters from across Australia to attend the Volunteer Leaders Programme, a five day intensive training course, which is aimed to develop leadership potential within the volunteer services.  It aims to give leaders new skills to ensure fire and emergency service volunteers are better prepared for the challenges ahead; and
• in New Zealand we support a variety of prominent causes including the New Zealand Blood Service, ‘Special Olympics’, Hospice New Zealand and Keep New Zealand Beautiful.

Research

We conducted research into electricity use using consultants to evaluate and benchmark consumption across warehouses and identify suitable sites to pilot energy efficient lighting options. This brief also included assisting in the development of the tender for the Sustainable Energy and Carbon Offset briefs.

As reported in the Environment section, we have undertaken a new research partnership with Murdoch University to investigate commercially-feasible ways to reduce our reliance on current grid- sourced energy. This will include exploring energy efficiency and micro-generation of renewable and/or hybrid energy sources for our warehouses. We will invest $450,000 in this project over the next two years.

Scholarships

We are a key supporter of the David Wirrpanda Foundation, a programme that works with groups of indigenous young people in Western Australia to equip them in readiness for work skills. We provide a customised training programme for these young persons so they can prepare to work in our stores as team members.

Awards

The Paintback™ recycling programme, of which we are a founding partner, was a winner in the eco innovation category for the Banksia Environmental awards 2007.