A Simple Guide to Sustainability

A recent Bank of Ireland and Davy Horizons webinar and a new report provides an essential guide to sustainability in business for private companies and SMEs.

As part of Bank of Ireland’s Sustainability Week, Bank of Ireland Corporate & Commercial and the sustainability advisory team at Davy Horizons hosted a very engaging webinar entitled “A Simple Guide to Sustainability in Business.”

Colette Shirley, director of Sustainability at Bank of Ireland Corporate & Commercial explained the drivers of Sustainability and how the Bank is supporting its customers through our suite of lending and sustainability supports to empower our customers to decarbonise.

The webinar coincided with the publication of a report entitled “A Simple Guide to Developing a Sustainability Strategy & Roadmap”, which aims to equip businesses with the knowledge to embark on their sustainability journey with maximum effect.

Time to think about sustainability

“All businesses should be thinking about sustainability within their business and, whether that means having key targets or KPIs, how are you tracking those targets, how are you monitoring them and how are you openly communicating them with stakeholders,” advised Shirley.

“At Bank of Ireland we have science-based targets which we track, report on quarterly as well as our sustainable finance volumes, but it is really about making sure that we are identifying the risks within our business from a sustainability perspective but also looking at the opportunities to help our customers and to drive new products and services.”

In its recently published 2024 Sustainability Report, the Bank revealed that it is supporting change in the financial landscape in Ireland with 28% of corporate lending customers now setting science-based targets (SBTs).

The Bank says it has reduced emissions across the organisation by 47% since 2020. Key initiatives in 2024 included a €5.5m investment in energy-efficient LED lighting and a further €3m investment over three years in energy efficiency improvements across a number of sites.

The Bank said it is driving change in the financial landsape through innovative new loan platforms such as Enviroflex agri-business sustainability loans which are available to 95% of dairy farmers nationwide and are based on environmental performance. It has also launched the EcoSaver mortgage product for homebuyers which is linked to the energy efficiency of homes.

Dr Dorothy Maxell, head of Sustainability & ESG Advisory at Davy Horizons outlined the Landscape of Sustainability in 2025 and explained that there are many important reasons why businesses should roadmap their sustainability strategy.

Importantly, she pointed out that while there has been a lot of ‘anti-ESG noise’, the commercial business case for reducing climate risk remains strong.

“Irrespective of whatever sector you’re in, there are some key trends in terms of sustainability that we’re seeing loud and clear in 2025 already,” Dr Maxwell explained. “The first one is, of course, a lot of noise that we’re seeing on the ESG backlash from the US Trump administration, relating to climate change, relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, human rights issues and more. But I think the reality is that if you are a business that is based here in the EU you have a significant amount of sustainability regulation that you have to meet. None of that has changed.”

What has also not changed is the pace of global warming and the implications for our planet and businesses themselves.

“The risks from climate change, also nature risk and social inclusion, all these issues are not going away for a business. As we look around us, last year we breached a 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise for the very first time, which is a threshold that we’ve been trying not to reach in terms of international climate policy and the increase in erratic weather events, very clear to all of us in Ireland, but from a practical perspective for business, what we’re also seeing is that the cost of that risk is starting to bite.”

Thorntons takes on CSRD

The webinar featured a very insightful business customer case study from David Duff from Thorntons Recycling.

Duff explained that the waste management business, which was founded in 1979, employs more than 800 people and serves 130,000 domestic customers and 11,000 commercial customers. It operates 10 waste facilities across Ireland and each year processes 750,000 tonnes of material.

He said that as a waste management company the business is at the coalface of reuse and recycling in Ireland but advises businesses that codifying it in a roadmap is crucial.

“We are an environmental company,” Duff explained. “Sustainability has been ingrained in our systems for years but we called it something different. Our primary aim as a waste management company is to reduce the amount of material that we sent to landfill, and we do this by processing the material on our sites and segregating this into its individual components.

“What we are basically looking to do is to recycle or to recover as much material as we can. And we’re actually very, very good at doing this. Last year in 2024 Thorntons recycled or recovered 93.6% of all of that waste that we took into our facilities. So we do believe that we’re excellent at what we do. We just then have to change our strategy a little bit to incorporate sustainability a bit more into it.

“And why are we doing this? We’re incorporating sustainability more into our company because our customers are starting to ask for it, they’re starting to ask questions about it, to ask questions about what we can do to help them be more sustainable, and also asking us, what are we doing to be more sustainable in our operations ourselves?

“So that’s why sustainability has come to the fore in recent years, and I suppose we are looking at sustainability as a means of reducing our wastage, enabling us to do more with less resources so that we’re actually more efficient.

“You can use sustainability to add benefit to your company in terms of your costs. It’s also important to us, because we are falling under the scope of CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) reporting and that is a driver for us now to implement sustainability initiatives within our company.

Duff explained that while Thorntons is an environmental company in its DNA, addressing the new sustainability legislation regulations and reporting standards like CSRD inspired it to work with Davy Horizons, the sustainability advisory part of Davy, to better understand its carbon footprint and develop its roadmap and carbon transition plan.

“We’ve been progressing very steadily for the last nine months, and that was the benefit of working with external contractors on it. We didn’t have the in-house expertise to do that. To calculate scope one and two, we were relatively comfortable doing that, but not with scope three. So we needed the experts and help from Davy, and they bought a huge amount of knowledge and expertise and we have been learning for the last nine months.

“Another challenge, as always with sustainability, is going to be the financial side of sustainability because it is going to take money and resources to do it. Bank of Ireland is supporting us as our main lender with finance and sustainability projects for us, and also offering advice and guidance feedback for the sustainability coordinator role, which basically will allow us keep on target.”

Duff said that integral to the entire sustainability strategy is the cultivation of a Climate Transition Plan. “It has made us clear on where we need to go, it has taken out the confusion we had working on our own, and has given us a roadmap of where we need to go.”

It includes a 50-point plan for reducing scope one and two emissions but also 30% reduction in scope three emissions. “They are ambitious targets but I believe we have the technology and systems to reach those standards.”

Useful reading:

Main image at top: Photo by name_ gravity on Unsplash

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