Named Overall Winner at this year’s SFA Small Business Awards, Leinster Environmentals is committed to environmental sustainability. Managing Director James Loughran talks to Jennifer McShane about taking stock of success and future plans.
Where did you get the idea to start Leinster Environmentals?
James Loughran (JL): I grew up near a seaside village on a family farm just outside Dundalk in County Louth. My childhood upbringing was very much based on the natural world and the world around us and this really created a very deep and long-lasting connection with the environment we live in. When I graduated from university after I had studied cultural science, I wanted to do something connected to the environmental landscape and make things a little bit better. I grew up around a family business and my dad and I decided to use our agricultural knowledge and resources to explore opportunities in the environmental sector and take it from there. We wanted to see what difference we could make around the core competencies we had. This led us to start recycling farm plastics, specifically black silage plastic, in the early 2000s when we founded the company.
What services does Leinster Environmentals offer?
JL: We are very passionate about diverting scrap plastic from landfills and oceans and preventing environmental pollution. Leinster Environmentals recycles waste plastic into low-carbon, high-quality raw materials, preventing this waste from entering our oceans or landfills. This raw material is used to make sustainable, lightweight and efficient parts for world-leading automotive and aerospace brands. By recycling enough waste plastic to fill almost 1000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the company is saving 80,000 tonnes of carbon emissions. These materials are ideal for manufacturing parts in industries that value sustainability, low carbon footprint, and high quality. We know many industries appreciate these features, and our products work really well for them as a feedstock.
When did you realise you were filling a significant gap in the industry?
JL: The industry changed almost overnight in 2016/ 2017 and it changed on the back of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet after it had a segment at the end of one episode highlighting ocean plastics. That absolutely revolutionised the conversation around scrap and waste plastics across Europe, as well as Ireland. So, it was very much a tipping point. It meant the recycling targets for plastics and the use of recycled plastics became more significant due to new regulations coming from Brussels and other jurisdictions. For example, the Single-Use Packaging Directive has reduced throwaway plastics, which means we have much less weight of plastic being thrown away. There are now many important schemes supporting these efforts, which is essential as we go forward.
What does winning the SFA Award mean for the company?
JL: It was absolutely unexpected. This is the third time we’ve been a finalist in the SFA awards and it was just fabulous to take part. We weren’t expecting to win our category and certainly did not expect to win overall, especially in a room with such incredible businesses. These are the backbone of the Irish economy, fueled by incredibly passionate people who drag themselves out of bed 360 days a year to put every ounce of effort into the business and for our activities to be considered as the best among those was extraordinarily humbling.
And it clearly meant a lot to your team
JL: Yes, the other aspect of it was from our team’s perspective. We employ 45 people and very few of them are customer-facing and get to experience how we are perceived in the world. So the accolade and the esteem that they get from realising and being aware of their efforts contributed to our business being recognised as one of the best in the country, which has been enormous. I’ve seen how many of the team are just that little bit more engaged – they’re that bit more confident about their work, and they’re even more proud of what they do, and that’s a real boost.
For those early entrepreneurs wanting to make a mark, what words of wisdom can you share?
JL: Anyone who starts a business, whether it’s in the environmental sector or any sector, is incredibly brave and deserves a huge amount of support and applause because taking the first steps is really hard. But nobody starts without taking those first steps. So I suppose one piece of advice is to, as Nike says, Just Do It – you’ve got to get going. You have to start making your mistakes and learning from them. Effectively, all business is a bunch of experiences where there have been slightly fewer mistakes than positive outcomes. You keep going, learn from them, and try to make incremental progress. We’ll soon be celebrating 20 years of business later this year, and we were probably 15 years in before could look at it and go, that’s a solid, sustainable business that can take care of itself. So it takes a long time for the things to get mature.
Can you share details about what’s next for the company?
JL: Just doing more of what we do, adding additional value to products and processes to make them more appealing to our customers. This is everything from trying to find additional strings of material that might be leaking into rented disposal routes and recovering them and recycling software, to trying to make our operations more efficient and more productive. For example, by the end of the year, 50% of our energy will be generated from an onsite solar array. And we will have upgraded our finished product by sorting it optically into various colour fractions, which is a new process we haven’t had before. We also want to upgrade our laboratory and testing centre so that we can provide our customers with a greater level of confidence in what we produce. So we’ve got quite big plans for the rest of the year. And then, in 2025 and 2026, we have a new building scheduled to begin construction. We’re very much looking forward to a busy couple of years. We have a great team around us who very much want to drive this business and these projects forward, and we look forward to being here and, in another four or five years’ time, having progressed the business to a significant degree.
