150,000 Trees and Counting

Tronox staff, families, and furry friends got their hands dirty, planting more than 10,000 trees at the 20^th annual Tree Planting Day in June.

More than 60 Tronox team members and their families enjoyed a beautiful winter day planting a residential reserve near our Chandala Processing Plant. Since the beginning of this yearly activity, Tronox staff has planted more than 150,000 trees in various locations around our Northern Operations.

Once the bare, four-hectare site is revegetated, it will provide forage for the Black Cockatoo, an endangered native bird in the area. It will also serve as a communal green play space for residents’ kids, with lots of trees, shrubs, and native wildflowers to explore.

But why is tree planting important?

The country around the Ellen Brook and Chittering Valley at Tronox’s Northern Operations (NOPs) has been substantially cleared for the past 120 years for grazing and farming enterprises. This has resulted in high levels of nutrients running off the paddocks into the waterways and finally into the Swan River. This excessive amount of nutrients creates algal blooms and fish kills in the upper reaches of the Swan River. The excessive clearing has caused a decline in the ecosystem and ecosystem services with a loss of habitat for local native fauna and a loss of native flora from the area. Revegetation restores habitat for local native fauna, increases native flora areas, and provides foraging habitat for the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo, an endangered species. Revegetation is part of the solution to these issues.

NOPs Site Director Ian Rennie was proud of the team’s commitment to the environment.

 “It’s always great to see families out in nature, making a difference to the environment,” he said. “Small efforts like these play an important role in creating a more sustainable future for everyone, and it’s great that Tronox can help achieve this.”

In addition to a fun family day, planting trees is a huge step towards a cleaner future, as trees:

• clean the air we breathe
• filter the water we drink
• provide habitat to over 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity
• enable 1.6 billion people to benefit from forestry-related jobs
• absorb harmful carbon from the atmosphere

Tronox has partnered with Chittering Landcare since 1998, turning a farmhouse on the Chandala property into an education center. The center has grown over the last 22 years and is now the hub for a number of land care and catchment groups that provide various environmental, sustainability and land care-related programs, as well as more than two million seedlings planted over this time.