Promoting sustainable forest management

Environmental excellence ‘gold standard’ achieved by Kimberly-Clark Australia

22 August 2008

Ross Hearne, Corporate Services Manager, congratulated the Environmental and Quality teams at Millicent and Tantanoola for recently achieving the ISO 14001 certification for Environmental Management and joining the Albury non-wovens mill in achieving this recognition.

“ISO 14001:2004 certification is the gold standard in environmental management”, said Ross Hearne.

“Our environmental experts, Josef Marzouk at Millicent and Stephen Say at Tantanoola as well as Peter Jackson, the Millicent Mill quality expert, worked hard to bring this to fruition. It took many months to ensure their procedures and management system would meet the auditor’s detailed requirements.

“Not that environmental management is new at the mills. Harley Wright, the Corporate Environmental Manager first introduced formal environmental procedures in 1992 and Kimberly-Clark was one of the first Australian companies to have formal environmental management”.

Peter, Stephen, Josef and Harley have worked systematically to refine existing procedures and training to ensure they could meet the ISO standard. The standard specifies many areas which must be properly covered in a management system. Working with the auditor from SAI Global, they worked through every aspect before the final audit.

Scott Whicker, Millicent Mill Manager, commented that the auditors commended Kimberly-Clark Australia on the following areas:

• the commitment of our staff
• our resources applied to environmental controls
• our procedures which are mature and well established
• we have not received any external complaints for a long time and
• our relationships with interested parties, EPA, schools, and local government.

Scott also noted that ISO 14001 Environmental Management accreditation complements the PEFC certification achieved earlier in the year at the Millicent and Tantanoola Mills. PEFC is the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification schemes.

Both these accreditations send a strong message to our customers about our environmental performance and our commitment to sustainability.