Doran’s Announce New Sustainability Policy
Sean Doran assembles a green army in the race to carbon neutrality!
As chairman of Howth Tourism, Sean Doran is passionate about attracting tourists to Howth while maintaining the status quo of the local biosphere.
It is so important that all businesses on the peninsula adapt their operations to ensure the reduction of carbon emmissions generated by our activities. It is not a quick fix, the resources we use in our day to day operations require full examination to see where improvements can be made. Education is a key part of our Green Team strategy, and our staff have volunteered to become green leaders and help their teams adapt to new “greener” methods of operating. We are focusing heavily right now on waste management, eliminating food waste, eliminating single use plastics amongst others.
Doran’s have joined forces with Sustainable Travel Ireland and have published a new Sustainability Policy. Setting ambitious yet manageable targets, the green team meet bi-weekly and take part in initiatives to achieve the targets set out in our policy. These include reducing energy consumption by 10% this year, reducing water consumption by 10% this year, and changing all packaging to compostable only packaging.
Reduction of food waste is ongoing for all Doran’s business units, and to date our greatest tool in the battle against food waste has been the use of the toogoodtogo food waste app. Doran’s load “magic bags” for sale on the app which contain a surprise selection of food products available at greatly reduced costs at the end of the day. Food that would otherwise end up in refuse goes to families in the area who save money on their weekly groceries and feed their families from our nutritious range of ready to cook meals. In the last three months 85 meals have been saved (multiply that by 3 people per meal) feeding 255 people and saving 212kg of carbon. To put this into understandable terms, 7 tress would need to be planted to offset the carbon emmissions if these meals had not been saved!
Our team will assemble next week for a biodiversity excursion with Nicole from Howth foraging. This will be an important green team building excercise, enabling the team to understand the biodiversity that surrounds us in the local area. We hope to learn how to use natural resources available to us in our locality, and our chefs are looking forward to learning about natural flowers, mushrooms and wild garlic to use in their menus.
We aim to achieve intermediate certification with Sustainable Travel Ireland by the end of the year, and by the end of 2023 we hope to announce that we are a carbon neutral business.
Thank you for reading and we are open to any suggestions from customers, local Howth residents and visitors to Howth.