The Federal Government has committed to a cap-and-trade carbon-emissions scheme to be established by 2012. With quite a short time frame, it is time to start making changes now, says Ecotech CEO Robert Dal Sasso, who has worked in the environmental monitoring industry for decades.

“We should get the wheels in motion – we don’t have to make the hard decisions right away, but get things moving that will help us achieve targets by 2012,” he said.

Dal Sasso believes that given people’s general resistance to change, initially carbon trading would have a negative impact on Australian coal companies and mines.

However, he said: “As there will be growing international pressure to comply, we need to be working on getting people in the right mindset and overcome resistance to change, then we should be able to be ahead of the rest of the coal producing countries with our carbon footprint, and will be in a better position to capture a larger amount of trade.”

One element of Ecotech’s business is offering emissions monitoring equipment to power stations – however, it says of all its clients only three currently monitor carbon dioxide. Given this example, it seems there is a lot of work to be done before power stations, let alone mines, are able to measure their carbon emissions.

Dal Sasso emphasised the importance of accurate monitoring: “The more accurate that NOx, SOx, CO, CO2 recordings are, the less penalty companies will probably have to pay on their carbon footprint.”

Ecotech is also involved in monitoring dust and noise from mines. The company tailors monitoring from impact and baseline analysis pre-development, through to monitoring to ensure the operation complies with regulations.

The company is also adamant that it does what it preaches, by “living what we sell” – with membership of Greenfleet, using green power and encouraging employees to drive hybrid vehicles.