Reducing emissions
Reducing impacts and enhancing local environments
The reality of climate change means reducing both our energy use and our reliance on non-renewable materials is imperative: effective action now will help reduce future impacts.
At Transurban we’re redesigning the energy, materials and methods we use with the goal of transforming our environmental impacts and bringing them ever-closer to net zero.
This reimagining of our operations extends to the protections we give to local flora and fauna, and to reducing the impact of noise and air pollution on communities living near our roads.
Worried about your own vehicle emissions?
While the world’s reliance on fuel is slowly changing – in the future the vast majority of vehicles will likely be powered by electricity – right now, road transport emissions account for about 12% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
If you’re concerned about emissions, travelling with us can make a difference. Our roads are designed to support more efficient driving: smooth surfaces; minimal bends and steep climbs; zero traffic lights and quick incident response to keep traffic flowing.
In the last year, customers driving on our roads:
413,000 hours
total travel time saved each workday
2,665 vehicle emissions (tCO2-e)
saved per day
28% reduction
in GHG emissions
All figures are averages over the 2022–2023 financial year.
Smoothing out your own driving can also make your travel more fuel efficient. Eco-driving is a driving approach that – and we researched this to confirm it’s true – reduces fuel use and the associated emissions.
Our business is roads and, for most of us, driving on any road burns up petroleum-based fuels such as gasoline or diesel. Almost all (95 per cent) of the world's transportation energy comes from non-renewable petroleum-based fuels.
To reduce emissions now, we are:
- improving road efficiencies and reducing the amount of time vehicles idle in traffic
- advocating for the transition to electric vehicles and promoting eco-driving
- shifting our own dependence on fossil fuels to more sustainable energy sources
- working to halve our own emissions by 2030, and reducing the emissions intensity of our supply chain, with Transurban becoming the first ASX20 company to have targets validated by the international Science Based Targets initiative.
- committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, encompassing Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.
See our Corporate Report to check our latest progress.
We’re always looking for opportunities to introduce more sustainable energy sources. We’ve now switched more than 80% of our Australian energy use to renewable sources. This has already cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 149,000 tonnes a year – delivering the same environmental benefits as planting about three million new trees.
We now have around 234 kW of solar energy generation capacity for use on our own roads and facilities. But most of our energy comes from buying electricity. We have made a significant shift to using clean energy, and now have Power Purchase Agreements with renewable energy developers in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland:
- All the power required to operate CityLink (Melbourne) will be sourced from renewable wind-farm technology by 2024. This will save up to 20,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from being released into the atmosphere each year.
- Our Sydney toll roads have 80% of their power needs met by renewable energy from wind generation. That’s the equivalent of powering nearly 20,000 Australian homes with wind power, and will save up to 89,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year.
- We're also sourcing 80% of the energy needed to run Brisbane toll roads and tunnels from wind power. That's the annual electricity use of 10,000 Australian homes and will save up to 40,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from being released into the atmosphere each year.
Restoring the natural environment along our motorways is important to local communities and us. We do this through our major construction projects - for example, the West Gate Tunnel Project in Melbourne will plant 170,000 trees and one million shrubs. In our day-to-day operations we look for sites next to our motorways that we can regenerate.
We’ve partnered with Landcare Australia and local artists to restore targeted sites, including:
- a one-hectare site next to CityLink (Melbourne) where natural ecosystem restoration was combined with the installation of a striking public artwork, Habitat Filter, built with recycled materials. The artwork has built-in nesting boxes for birds and bats and solar panels to offset night-time lighting.
- a five-hectare site next to the Hills M2 Motorway (Sydney) where we improved the local creek’s water quality and planted thousands of trees. Another piece of public art was commissioned, called Kinetica, and this represents native flora.
In Queensland, we’re planting more than 128,000 koala habitat trees to enhance over 146 hectares of koala habitat across Brisbane, including along the Gateway and Logan motorways.
The mining, manufacture and supply of materials used in construction, such as concrete and steel, impacts both the environment and communities living near our project works. Sourcing sustainable materials and methodologies can create benefits such as reducing the use of non-renewable resources and lowering emissions.
Reusing existing materials (such as spoil from tunnel excavation works) can also reduce the number of truck movements around project sites.
Given the scale of our construction projects, we are developing a circular economy strategy to help us integrate sustainable materials into our construction projects and road-maintenance works.
As part of this strategy, we’re also working with our suppliers with the goal of creating a more sustainable supply chain.
See how we’re saving emissions with smarter design and construction solutions
