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Supply Chain and Circular Economy

Our goal is to integrate high environmental, social and governance standards and sustainability leadership into all of our sourcing activities. 

Here are some of our key actions:  

 

  • Collaborating with others so we support suppliers with training to acquire and deliver best practice.
  • Aligning our processes with ISO’s Guidance Standard on Sustainable Procurement (ISO 20400).
  • Updating our procurement policies, procedures and due diligence standards in alignment with the Ethical Trading Initiative base code and applicable EU Directives.

Sustainable Procurement

We aim to ensure that sustainability is embedded across every function, including procurement, as an essential step towards our goal of making a contribution to the organisation's sustainability vision, and society as a whole.

We are committed to sustainably minimising waste in all our operations. We consider waste minimisation in the procurement of material, equipment and associated packaging. It is also our intention to progressively move to electronic means of transacting business with our suppliers.

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Case Study: How we are embedding sustainability across our business functions

Conor O’Regan, our Chief Procurement Officer, explains the changes being made to embed sustainability across our business functions and the importance of being one of the 15 founding partners of the new The Irish Supply Chain Sustainability School.

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Resource Use and Circular Economy

We are committed to the sustainable sourcing of materials (including recycled materials) and implementing end-of-life plans across our business. Our actions include:

  • Adding life cycle cost assessments as part of tender specification for all major capital projects.
  • Having end-of-life plans in place for wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries to maximise reuse or recycling of materials.
  • Ensuring sustainability-related contract award criteria are in use for all major tenders.

Case Study: Repurposing wind turbine blades for innovative e-mobility project

In the coming years, some of our wind farms will be decommissioned with the associated wind turbine blades meeting the end of their lifespan. We recently collaborated with BladeBridge, a Cork-based start-up that was initiated by our internal incubator programme X_Potential on a project to construct e-mobility hubs using repurposed turbine blades.

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ESB Sustainability Leadership Plan

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