Tritech’s Sustainable Culture
Tritech is a mechanical, electrical and maintenance contractor who help their customers optimise their real estate through smart engineering solutions. Lawler Sustainability have been helping Tritech create their 5 Year Sustainability plan to become the Sustainability Leader in Ireland’s M&E sector.
In this interview Kayleigh-Ann Myles, Head of ESG & Sustainability Reporting at Lawler Sustainability shares why Tritech are strengthening their commitment to sustainability through Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Environmental Social Governance (ESG) best practices.
Since the enactment of CSRD in Ireland large companies must now comply with these reporting standards by law, however Tritech are already ahead in many ways with their sustainable culture which is embedded deep within the company. This stems from having a sustainability champion at director level within Tritech who knew the importance of backing up their environmental claims with evidence which created a natural synergy with Kayleigh-Ann on behalf of Lawler Sustainability.
Tritech are indeed a growing company and they are growing fast, and they recognised that they are going to have to comply with a lot more sustainability requirements with CSRD and different requirements for exporting and moving abroad. They also recognised they needed some direction and structure to achieve their sustainability commitments and goals.
Anyone in the M&E space right now have sustainability on their agenda whether it’s been pushed from a green certification point of view or pushed by investor demand or local directives etc. So if you are working in the building industry you are definitely coming to terms with some sort of sustainability certification and this only means something if you have the proof to back up your sustainability claims.
Tritech were already doing a lot of the work but recognised the benefit of bringing a sustainability consultant in, such as Lawler Sustainability, not only to walk them through the steps of how to do it effectively, but first of all by peeling back the work they’ve already done and looking for the verifiable proof. And that is how Tritech will establish themselves as Sustainability Leader within their industry.
Are You an ESG Baseliner?
The 5 pillars, listed below, are what we, at Lawler Sustainability, are working on with Tritech to crate a path with key milestones between now and the next 5 years to achieve their sustainability goals who are aiming for a 35% reduction in overall carbon emissions between now and 2029.
- Carbon emissions
- Energy efficiency
- Renewable energy
- Embodied carbon
- Waste
A lot of the time companies are being pushed with all these areas in terms of sustainability, for example you should be ISO 15001 certified or your building should be LEED certified etc. But what you need to do is go back to the operations, the actual intrinsic value of a company. Of course all those certifications are helpful at the right time but you can easily end up shooting yourself in the foot by doing something that might not actually have a massive impact on your sustainability goals.
It is key to stress that every company’s sustainability journey will be different. So when we started our work with Tritech we looked at the different things Tritech were being prompted to do and we peeled back the layers to see what made sense and when it actually made sense to implement, and that’s where a Sustainability Strategy comes into play.
The Sustainability Strategy is so important because you don’t just jump into action with sustainability because that’s when it will become a cost and something you don’t get a massive return on. You have to peel back the layers and figure out what strategy is effective to you so there is no generic sustainability strategy – it is bespoke and unique to each business. We are at a stage in industry where we are moving into regulatory auditing and companies are picking up the slack, or as we call this at Lawler Sustainability “ESG Baseliners” – as in companies that are starting from scratch with all this are now jumping on board.
There is no quick solution to ensure you have the data to achieve your sustainability goals and back up your claims you have to put pen to paper in terms of the work you’ve done as far as CSRD or ESG auditing goes.
To avoid greenwashing you must have trustworthy, auditable, and transparent data to back up your sustainability claims. If you don’t you are at risk of misleading your consumers which can be very expensive due to high legal, financial and reputational risks – Kayleigh-Ann Myles, Head of ESG & Sustainability Reporting at Lawler Sustainability
So What Is In It for Tritech?
By establishing themselves as sustainability leaders within their industry, means anyone looking for the services Tritech provide are going to select Tritech. If you are a sustainable company within your industry and you are effectively proving that – not only communicating that because everyone can do that, but having the evidence to back it up and having the right structure in place such as a plan to show how you are taking effective steps to meet certain targets by a certain timeline and your on track and your company knows about the different sustainability measures you are taking, it means you are ahead of the competition.
If an investor or a developer who needs Tritech’s services has three companies on the list for tender and one of them has the ESG metrics, and the other two don’t, they are going to pick the one with better sustainability credentials.
It’s not just about reporting to CSRD, it actually goes back to that ESG element because it is likely whoever the client or investor is they are also going to be CSRD compliant, and the likelihood is they will already be International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) complaint, so they are going to have way more auditing than the likes of Tritech or any other competitor in this space. But what’s important is to align with best practices in terms of ESG as best as you possibly can and that’s where having a sustainability consultant, such as Lawler Sustainability, to keep Tritech on track is crucial to ensure trustworthy, audible and transparent information to proof your environmental claims.
Having a sustainability consultant on board also allows real oversight for example if a company was looking to change all their fleet to EV, we can then go in and do a carbon mapping to establish their baseline, which is something we did with Tritech by looking at all their Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and actually pinpointing their carbon emissions exactly.
That way, a company is not making unconscious decisions in their sustainability efforts because if they purchased a full EV fleet and then we did the assessment after and we saw it’s not actually the vehicles that omitting the most carbon emissions but actually improving energy efficiency or waste usage then you can see the real benefits in terms of meeting your sustainability goals and in this case real cost savings to the company.
These are the real benefits to Tritech so in the next 5 years we are not only making sure they are sustainable leaders, we are making sure they stay consistent as sustainability leaders and stay ahead of the competition by making the right decisions now and they get an oversight on what they need to structure to get the right verifiable proof to achieve their commitments and goals to sustainability.
Full interview with Tritech and Kayleigh-Ann Myles
Kayleigh-Ann is interviewed by Tiffany Quinn, CEO at Generate Leads about the work she is doing with Tritech Group’s Green M&E Solutions and their 5 Year Sustainability Roadmap & CSRD Compliance.
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