Helping your Nursery business improve its Eco-Efficiency

Environmental Management Best Practice for Nurseries

The Centre of Excellence in Cleaner Production is working in partnership with the Nursery Industry to develop a Best Practice Guide to assist industry in managing their environmental impacts. The specific aim of the project is to develop and promote practices that can be adopted by existing nurseries to reduce their environmental impacts, especially the discharge of nutrients and other pollutants to watercourse.

The proposed objective for this proposal is to develop practical guidelines to encourage and assist nurseries in developing objectives for environmental improvement and methods for achieving these objectives. The guidelines will be designed so that they can be delivered through training sessions which might be arranged by National Garden Industries (WA) (NGI(WA)), and would include training material. It is not envisaged that the budget would permit training delivery, although a training session using the material will be delivered at the end of the project. The material can subsequently tailored to businesses’ own needs to help create ownership.

The guidelines will be in the form of which can be made into a booklet or manual, and in the form of information sheets. These will be produced in the form of camera-ready originals and exclude production.

The focus of the project with respect to sub-sectors and activities needs to be defined ie whether to make the guide generic or focussed on specific activities. This might be done up-front or following an initial issues review. We understand that the proposed focus will be on pot plant growers, since these are especially heavy users of water, fertilisers and pesticides, but guidance on best practice should be more widely applicable where possible. This program is in the early stage of development, and please regularly visit this website for the latest information. However, in the mean time we have included links to websites and listed resources to assist managers in improving the environmental performance in their businesses.