In Ireland, we will focus in the short term on our sites and offices’ carbon footprint and where practical, that of our water operations infrastructure.

We will also target a 2% year-on-year reduction in our energy consumption, relying on a fully decarbonised grid by 2045, and ensuring all new company cars or vans will be fully electric or hybrid from 2026, with our fleet fully decarbonised by 2040. With regard to our sites and offices’ footprint, this includes a project to install solar photovoltaics at our waste transfer facility in Fermoy, Co. Cork, as well as at our largest water treatment sites. In the longer term we will look to develop a rollout strategy for solar PV for long duration operational contracts, thereby improving the energy efficiency of these sites.

We will also look to increase the Scope for our ISO 50001 Energy Management certification to incorporate our offices and reflect the full Scope of our Irish operations. This, including the installation of sub metering in our leased offices, will ensure a sustainable ongoing management system to reduce and maintain at a minimum our support functions’ operational carbon footprint. In Northern Ireland, we are commencing work on optimising power generation and dewatering within our municipal wastewater treatment contract. Our next step in evaluating our downstream transportation emissions is to combine the above long-term commitment to a decarbonised fleet with efficiencies analyses in our transportation routes and networks to identify, where practicable, alternative lower-overall-carbon solutions. 

As for the whole UK & Ireland zone, reducing process emissions from our activities is one of the biggest challenges in our journey to Net Zero. In addition to reviewing our models and calculations for our GHG process emissions and applying the learnings from the wider water and wastewater treatment industry, we will be taking some specific action locally.

We will look to build on the work done at Osberstown with advanced anaerobic digestion and thermal hydrolysis to utilise similar technologies where appropriate, as well as investigating alternative fuel sources, such as biodiesel. While we have operational control at many of the sites which would be potentially suitable for projects like this, they are often owned by our customers and so will require us to work in partnership with them or at the very least ensure that any technologies we install are also compatible with our customers’ strategy for a particular site.   

For now, our focus in Ireland remains on reducing as much as possible our emissions through efficiency, investment and working in partnership with our stakeholders.

However, like throughout the UK and Ireland, we recognise that capturing what remains will be necessary. We will be working with our colleagues throughout Veolia to explore our options, develop and implement the best strategy.

Similar to the UK, we are committed to work in partnership with our various stakeholders throughout Ireland.

We were delighted to be a member of the Business in the Community Ireland Leaders Subgroup for Low Carbon which this year relaunched the Low Carbon Pledge with new commitments, and to be one of the first 65 companies in Ireland to make this renewed commitment to leadership in action towards low carbon.

For the same reasons, we were equally delighted to also sign up to the Business in the Community Northern Ireland Low Carbon Pledge this year. Demonstrating leadership through actions in partnership is a vital role that businesses must play for society and we intend to continue this work.

We have also carried and will continue to carry this responsibility through to our responses to the various public consultations in Ireland and Northern Ireland that are taking place around public climate and energy strategies.

We also intend to continue to work with partner customers such as Irish Water to co-develop alternative sludge processing strategies and with our CHP customers to put long-term strategies in place.

With a longer-term perspective, we will be promoting electrification in anticipation of the grid being fully decarbonised by 2045 at the latest.

Building on the work to date to improve our GHG reporting, the continuous improvement of our reporting is an ongoing focus in Ireland.

This will be especially relevant as everyone’s understanding of and ability to map their carbon footprint evolves, particularly within Scope 3. Our initial focus will be to include in the 2021 footprint the Refrigerant Gases and Downstream Transportation elements which we were unable to include in the 2020 footprint calculations (cf Ireland 2020 GHG Emissions table).

We have already implemented the first Carbon and Energy Fund (CEF) Energy Performance Contracts for public hospitals in Ireland, as well as successful efficiency projects and contracts across waste, water and energy for our various customers particularly in the Life Sciences, Food & Beverage, Technology and Public (water treatment, healthcare and education) sectors.

We will continue to increase our involvement and co-development work with our customers in this space.

A number of additional conversations have already commenced with our clients to start work on low carbon roadmaps, in addition to the various projects already in operation, and we will continue to increase this focus for our stakeholders in the coming years. How we approach new business opportunities in the most sustainable way will also be part of our scope of study and ongoing strategy evolution.