Environment Management Survey

NAME OF ORGANISATION
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

OVERVIEW
The Environment Management Survey (EMS) is driven by a number of forces. Primarily, these are: Australia's international requirements for comparable data for environment management expenditure; Australia's environment policy requirements, at Federal, State, and Local levels of Government; ABS's internal need for data in other associated statistical areas, eg the water account - a satellite account to the National Accounts; and data useable for private and public organisations to benchmark their own environmental performance.
These areas are better satisfied statistically with a broader view of environment management as compared with the previous focus on Environment Protection Expenditure. The new EMS includes all activities undertaken including storage, handling, treatment, transport, reuse, recycling, and/or disposal of waste.
The new eco-efficiency component of the survey attempts to make some sense of the financial data and physical data in terms of performance. Eco-efficiency basically means that: if the production of goods were to remain constant, the resource inputs decrease; or production occurs in such a way that less waste or less pollution per unit of production is generated.
There are two conceptual components to the survey, financial and eco-efficiency. These components link to together in such a way as to be able to create detailed estimates of the actual financial waste measures in Australia, as well as to derive organisational attitude information.

PURPOSE
The purpose of the Environment Management Survey is to collect financial and eco-efficiency data to satisfy the needs of the primary drivers as mentioned in Overview above.

SCOPE
Australian and New Zealand Standard Industr Classification (ANZSIC) subdivisions 11,12,13,14
Complete enumeration (CE) 100+, sample 0-99

ANZSIC subdivisions 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29
CE 500+, sample 0-499

DATA DETAIL

Conceptual framework
The EMS provides measures of environment management activities in the mining and manufacturing industries. Environment management financial activity is an aggregate of expenditure on solid waste management, liquid waste management, air emissions management, and other environment management expenses such as noise control. Eco-efficiency ratios provide indicators to determine the relative amount of inputs to outputs in industrial systems, taking into account levels of waste, as described in Overview above. EMS will provide some indicators of eco-efficiency for the mining and manufacturing industries in the 2000-2001 survey, and in other industries in subsequent surveys.

Main outputs
Management Unit level.
ANZSIC subdivision by State (specific data items)
ANZSIC subdivision by business size (all data items)
Data Items:

• Income and expenses related to environment management
• Indicators of eco-efficiency

Other concepts (summary)
None

GEOGRAPHIC DETAIL
Australia
New South Wales
Victoria
Queensland
South Australia
Western Australia
Tasmania
Northern Territory
ACT

Comments and/or Other Regions
Excludes Australian Territories.

COLLECTION FREQUENCY
2 Yearly

Frequency comments
This collection is related to the former Waste Management & Environmental Protection Survey which was scheduled to run every 2 years. The Environment Management Survey will replace the Waste Management & Environmental Protection Survey and is scheduled to be run for the first time for the 2000-2001 financial year, and proposed for every second year thereafter.

COLLECTION HISTORY
A similar collection previously known as the Waste Management & Environmental Protection Survey, is being replaced by the Environment Management Survey. The last annual Waste Management & Environmental Protection Survey was conducted for the 1996-97 reference period.
The scope of the Environment Management Survey has been broadened to accommodate user comment in a review conducted formally by the Environment and Energy Statistics Section in May-June 2000. The administration of the collection is also changing since the new EMS will be administered by a single specialized, mini-National Processing Centre hosted by the Victorian State Office, instead of as a supplementary survey administered by multiple National Processing Centres.
The target population has changed from an economy wide perspective to focus on key industries with a large impact on environment, ie Mining and Manufacturing. This allows the focus of resources to be allocated to industries of key importance to users of the data. It is expected that the biennial survey will rotate through industries so as to create a broad industry perspective over time, beginning with Mining and Manufacturing.

DATA AVAILABILITY
Yes