Sustainability

The community, Health and Safety, and environmental responsibility are fundamental to The O'Neill & Brennan Group's approach to construction. Our policy is to protect and enhance local and global environments.

By giving environmental considerations equal importance to traditional business issues, we are committed to carrying out our activities in a manner that meets the needs of the present without compromising the quality of life of future generations, and apply this principle to the way we do business.

Advancing to a Sustainable Future

O’Neill & Brennan are committed to playing a key role in enabling the Construction industry to sustainably use resources to meet the needs and expectations of our communities, without compromising future generations and our planet.

Our strategy to ensure we make the impacts we aspire to is based on 5 pillars:

Partnerships for impact
Providing good employment
Innovation & skills development
Supporting communities
Decarbonising construction

UN Sustainable Development Goal

We have invested in applying the UN Sustainable Development Goal's (SDG's) Framework to our business. This strategy along with its associated goals, and measurements, are the culmination of our efforts over many years.

Despite our progress made to date, we recognise there is a long way to go. Our 30:50 strategy is intended to drive short term actions to make a significant difference quickly (2030), with an eye on not compromising our ultimate goal which is to be making positive impacts by 2050.

Our sustainability roadmap sets out where our major impacts are, and how we will move forward directly and with our customers.

Reducing Carbon Emissions

O’Neill & Brennan recognise that reducing carbon emissions from our business operations is critical to the industry and all our stakeholders. We are committed to achieving Net Zero and have started a process to establish how we will do this in line with, and ideally ahead of, accepted Science Based Targets.

We have set ambitious targets and our office infrastructure, while not our biggest impact area, is an obvious target for us to reduce emissions and carbon intensity. We are moving quickly to renewable tariffs in and aim to reach 100% by March 2024.

Company Fleet

Our policy is to minimise company fleet and encourage public transport use and where this is not practical, our ambition is to get to an all-electric fleet by 2030. The last miles of journeys for smaller deliveries can have a disproportionate impact on emissions as well as site congestion. O’Neill & Brennan has been utilising material consolidation off site, supplemented by sustainable modes of delivery / collections to and from our sites. To date this has been very successful, and we intend to offer this approach to more clients upon successful completion and evaluation.

Partnerships

Our move to a sustainable fleet, includes the integration of our site plant, such as telehandlers and other sustainable plant solutions.

Resource efficiency, reuse, and handling minimisation all have significant carbon reduction impacts, and this is a key focus area through our logistics business. Once again partnerships are critical to our success. While looking for partnerships that reduce waste and contribute to the circular economy, we also look to support social and community enterprises. Building a deeper relationship with and understanding of the strategies of our waste management partners is a short-term priority. We have engaged with all our waste management partners to establish robust standardised waste reporting including, reuse, recycling on and off site.

Bespoke Delivery Management System

We have a bespoke DMS (delivery management system), which records all CO2 emissions of delivery vehicles, based on vehicles type. This creates a complete record of all delivery vehicles attending projects.

As our core business is providing our customers with the people, they need to deliver their projects, we recognise the influence they have on productivity. The right number of people, with the right skills and experience that you can rely on will boost productivity, speeding up work and reducing waste, all of which supports decarbonisation.

All our spend on Logistics is local to enhance both social value and environmental sustainability targets. On trades & Labour we always target local workers - reduction in travel, wellbeing, familiarity, community pride, and candidate referrals are all enhanced.