Lowering Emissions in Lower Hutt

Head of Climate and Waste at Hutt Valley Council, Jörn Scherzer drives internal initiatives around solid waste and carbon reduction. His mandate is to improve council efficiency and advise teams on what they can do to lower their carbon output, from phasing out natural gas to electrifying their fleets.

When Jörn joined the council three and a half years ago, carbon was much less of a concern than cost. He realised early on that getting the green outcomes he desired would require convincing decision makers of the potential savings. Though the council already had EROAD and a fleet administrator, they used telematics mainly for vehicle tracking and health and safety but didn’t do much with the data.

Once they hired consultants to perform a fleet utilisation analysis in 2018, however, that EROAD data really came into its own. It could tell them things like how far each vehicle had travelled, how much of the time they were parked up, and of any functional overlap between departments or across locations. Because of his background at EECA, where he had worked for six years prior, Jörn could see that the council’s fleet was “pretty inefficient” straight away: “You’d just have to walk toward the car park and you’d find a lot of cars parked up during the day.”

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All government agencies are also tasked with aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050. After removing 13 fleet vehicles and increasing EV uptake – the low-hanging fruit – the council turned its attention to its contractors.

“Emissions from the service providers we contract are actually part of our carbon footprint: vehicles servicing public litter bins, maintaining streetlights, and the whole range of services councils provide,” says Jörn. “Contractor emissions are more complex because it’s not something we necessarily control directly, but we do it through procurement.”

Seeking to reward companies for going green, Hutt Valley Council assigned “bonus points” to bidding contractors with electric vehicles. “If you just talk about it but don’t assign any weight to it in your tender documentation, you’re not going to get what you’re asking for.”

It’s one thing to want to make changes but another to actually make them happen. “It takes massive organisational change to get a new service rolled out, so any carbon reduction initiatives or objectives you want to achieve need to be built in right from the get-go.”

While the technology for waste management is already there, other sectors are still emerging, so make sure you allow bidding contractors adequate time to prepare. Jörn recommends notifying them a year out. But bear in mind that having a procurement policy is only part of the equation. “You still need champions within the organisation to actually implement it.”

The same can be said of telematics data: “You can track it, but unless you have someone who actually analyses the data and uses it to say, ‘Okay, we need to improve,’ then it’s just data you collect for no particular reason.”

The fleet administrator they had was only part-time and generally provided transactional information like quotes rather than input on the advisability of a given vehicle. “That’s something I do now, look at what they actually need. As a result of the OptiFleet review, we moved to purchasing and now have a centralised fleet budget and about 10 vehicles in a centralised pool.”

Relationship management and engaging stakeholders is absolutely crucial. “To do that, you need to be proactive and look at opportunities. You need internal champions to think of these things, enact them, and then take them to those stakeholders.”

The change management process required a formal HR proposal and consultation period where stakeholders could provide feedback on the proposed changes. After taking that feedback on board and making some adjustments, the plan was announced by the CEO with the buy-in of the whole management team.

Well ahead of the rollout, they communicated to staff that EVs were coming and what people would be expected to do, including plugging in after returning from every trip, regardless of battery status. “At the moment we can do that because we’ve got enough charging stations. It eliminates the doubt factor.”

The vehicles the council prioritised for electrification were pool cars. “We’ve rolled out charging stations here at the council, so they just charge up overnight.” They also developed a guide to be kept in pool vehicles for people to refer to, particularly since pool drivers may use vehicles only sporadically. With that in mind, policies were designed to be clear and easy to remember: “If you come back, you plug in. It’s that simple. Rather than plug in because it’s at 80% or less, which is a bit more complicated, especially for drivers who don’t use the car very often.”

The more difficult vehicles to replace were the take-home vehicles, particularly four-wheel drives, because there aren’t many fully electric models on the market. The council is currently trialling the Mitsubishi Outlander and MG5 station wagons for staff designated take-home vehicles. “Previously, every vehicle was taken home and now it’s about 50-50; half of the vehicles are assigned. We’ve also realised additional savings because we avoid a lot of fringe benefit tax.”