sustainability
Sustainable Business
Responsibly managing environmental, social and governance aspects has always been part of the way we do things – it just makes good business sense. Being a sustainable business enables us to live our values and deliver on our purpose and meet stakeholder expectations over time.
Foreword
Our Board, representing our shareholders, guides Port Waratah’s strategic direction, oversees risk management and ensures strong governance.
Port Waratah’s maturity as a business is reflected in its integration of a comprehensive approach to sustainability with a clear operating strategy. This integration ensures its values-driven commitment to meeting stakeholder obligations is given practical effect in day-to-day operations.
Port Waratah achieved a milestone in asset investment in 2025. Between July and November, the team delivered the first stage of a significant investment programme in the life of the Kooragang Terminal aimed at supporting customer demand beyond 2030.
Stefanie Loader
Chairperson
Welcome
Welcome to Port Waratah’s 2025 Sustainability Performance Report. Our report together with the Annual Financial Report and Statements, provides our various stakeholders with insight into the opportunities, risks and challenges we face as an organisation through the lens of our operating strategy, our five drivers for success.
Our goal is to perform our operations without harm to people, community and environment. Our commitment to health and safety and environmental performance resulted in improvements on prior year performance in both respects against most of our targets. Explore our performance here.
Overall, terminal performance remained consistent with five-year averages, with total asset reliability above 96.6 percent. Pleasingly, we finished the year strongly, loading 96.5 million tonnes of coal for export and delivering a low vessel queue to start 2026. Total volumes were slightly lower than in 2024 but were consistent with export volumes over the last decade. Forecast customer demand in 2026 is expected to remain around 100 million tonnes.
Hennie du Plooy
chief executive officer
Being a sustainable business
Port Waratah plays a vital role in the Hunter Valley Coal Chain, enabling our customers to reach a global market. We stockpile, blend and load coal for export in the Port of Newcastle, and own and manage export terminals at Kooragang and Carrington, both of which operate 24/7/365. We build strong relationships and work cooperatively with our people, our customers and our community, continuously improving our performance and contributing to a more sustainable society.
Port Waratah has near-term stability and certainty of customer demand for terminal services of around 100 million tonnes to the end of this decade. The operational focus remains to deliver our terminal services that customers expect within a sustainable business model. We continue to regularly assess customer expectations and the energy transition plans of export destinations in assessing future demand for terminal services. We expect demand for our services to continue and have strategies to operate and maintain our infrastructure in line with evolving global demand.
Materiality
Understanding our material topics is essential for our sustainability approach and reporting to an international standard. It ensures we manage, monitor and report on issues that are important to our business and to our stakeholders.
We review our material topics through a formal assessment process. We engaged community via the Local Voices survey and Community Meeting Group representatives, as well as employees, customers, contractors and industry partners to learn which topics they find important and to better understand their expectations.
How we manage our impacts and contribute to the SDGs
We integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks and opportunities into our operations. Our business driver framework maximises sustainable practices and helps us to manage social, economic, and environmental impacts in an integrated way. It encourages and fosters transparency and collaboration with stakeholders and enables us to live our values of service, progress, integrity, excellence and caring, and deliver on our purpose. The framework also helps us to contribute to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of our own business and operational environment through the implementation of specific strategies, systems and initiatives.