Solid Energy is the largest coal producing company in
New
Zealand, employing 500 people and more than 250
mining contract personnel. The coal produced by Solid Energy plays a significant
part in the energy mix for New Zealand being supplied to the
coal-fired power station at Huntly. It is also supplied to a wide range of
industrial users, NZ Steel, and primary processing. It is fair to say however
that the positive economic and social benefits of coal have to some extent been
overshadowed by the negative environmental consequences of coal mining.

Over the past two years Solid Energy have been actively
researching and addressing the impacts that they currently have on the
environment and making a significant investment in environmental improvements,
rehabilitation projects and environmental research to address historical and
ongoing environmental issues. These investments have been driven by the
company's commitment to its environmental policy, which states:

Solid Energy's
overall environmental objective is for the cumulative result of all the
activities we undertake to have a positive net effect on the New Zealand
environment'.

With such significant investment it is essential that the
company is able to target expenditure wisely, ie invest where there is greatest
environmental gain to be had, and are also able to actively demonstrate to
stakeholders the improvements that are achieved. In order to be able to
demonstrate the commitment and the steps that the company is making towards this
goal a number of systems have been developed. Firstly an environmental management system along the lines
of ISO14001 formalising the environmental processes, responsibilities, auditing
and management review. Secondly as part of the
planning element of the EMS an environmental
management matrix, which allows the scoring of sites against environmental
management goals, has been developed. Thirdly the monitoring and measuring tools
have been upgraded with GIS driven relational databases installed for management
of consent related information and monitoring results.

The development of the environmental management matrix has
drawn on a number of existing systems such as the Australian Institute of Mining
and Minerals Code 2000. In addition to adapting the scoring regimes from these
methods the Solid Energy Environmental Matrix has been further developed to
ensure that it reflects the actual environmental impacts on site, as well as the
management and audit systems that are in place to control them at a strategic
level. The development of this matrix has
included a number of steps:

reviewing the information that
stakeholders would be interested in,

reviewing what was already
available,

development of systems to
collect data and benchmark the current
operations,
and

setting up support systems to
ensure that the correct information would be provided for
scoring.