Toyota North America recently presented Maritz with its first Environmental Sustainability Award. Here’s how it happened.
Maritz recently received the first Environmental Sustainability Award from Toyota North America IPSS (Indirect Procurement Shared Services) to recognize how the company demonstrated its overall commitment to environmental sustainability and specifically helped the company reduce carbon, conserve water and/or promote diversity. These are all important to the company’s ability to achieve Toyota’s Challenge 2050 goals — and Maritz Carbon Measurement Footprint Tool (CFMT) helped them move toward achieving those goals when it was used at the company’s 2023 SupplierCon event.
“We are humbled and grateful for Toyota’s vision and for their support of our tool and this work,” said Rachel Riggs, Maritz’ General Manager, Environmental Strategy.
Prevue recently caught up with Riggs to learn more.
Prevue: How did this all begin?
Riggs: I had been talking about the launch of the tool on LinkedIn and at industry events, and [a Maritz client from Toyota North America] came to me and said, “I want to measure the carbon footprint of my event. This is something our sustainability team is hot on the trail of.” I said, “OK, we got you.” We worked with their sustainability team for year — I am now a big fan girl of their Chief Sustainability Officer Kevin Butt, who is the smartest and nicest human you could ever want to meet — and we got to really understand what they were doing, and how we could lean in to help them. They saw our process and really loved it. Kevin is the one who handed the award to me. We were all excited about it.
Prevue: What exactly is the award for?
Riggs: It’s a group award to recognize what Maritz has done to help them grow their awareness on environmental strategy, but it’s also an award for this specific program. We had worked with Toyota, and Lexus, which is a Toyota brand, for a while, and they always seem to love the ideas we bring to the table, and this is one of those ideas. They asked us to use the tool to measure their dealer meeting for Lexus, and now we’re finishing that process and will use the results to showcase how we can help them design events differently to lessen their environmental impact.
This whole process has really opened my eyes to how forward-thinking a car company can be. Toyota is a lot like Maritz in that way. They’re practical and have a lot of really smart people on their team. It was a perfect partnership, similar to our partnership with Mastercard. We’re measuring their meeting for the fourth time now, and it’s really exciting to see how they have integrated sustainability into their meeting strategy. It’s fascinating watching behavior change throughout this process.
Prevue: What’s the best place to start improving a meeting’s sustainability?
Riggs: It all starts with design. With Mastercard, we came in and actively measured what the client was currently doing, then made recommendations. When those were implemented, they saw a per-person reduction, which was pretty spectacular. In the third year, we made more design recommendations, which they took to heart and got even more reduction. Now that we’re in the fourth year, and it will be really cool to see it play out, because they had specific reasons for holding this meeting in a specific location, which meant they had to design differently to keep their emissions down. It’s really exciting to be a part of this process.
We now have four or five clients that have taken what we’re doing and incorporating it into their event sustainability policy, which is pretty awesome. It’s very powerful to be able to present something, have people embrace the idea and then make meaningful changes.
Prevue: So you’re not seeing any drop-off in interest in event sustainability?
Riggs: Not at all — the pace is actually accelerating. I do the carbon accounting for all four of Maritz’ divisions, and the number of requests we’re getting from companies to reach certain scores in EcoVadis and CDP is increasing. I’m also seeing more inquiries about our carbon measurement tool.
We’re on a good trajectory, and it’s very encouraging.
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