Maritz sustainable development

Toyota North America recently presented Maritz with its first Environmental Sustainability Award. Here’s what happened.

Maritz recently received the first Environmental Sustainability Award from Toyota North America IPSS (Indirect Procurement Shared Services) in recognition of how the company demonstrates its overall commitment to environmental sustainability and specifically helps the company reduce carbon emissions and conserve water. and/or promote diversity. These are all important to the company’s ability to achieve Toyota Challenge 2050 goals, and the Maritz Carbon Measuring Footprint Tool (CFMT) helped them achieve these goals when used at the company’s 2023 Supplier Conference.

“We are humbled and grateful for Toyota’s vision and their support of our tools and this work,” said Rachel Riggs, general manager of environmental strategy at Maritz.

Prevue recently spoke with Riggs to learn more.

Previous article: How did it all start?

Riggs: I’ve been talking about the rollout of this 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. That’s what our sustainability team is working on.” “We’ve been working with their sustainability team for a year now and I’m their chief sustainability officer, Kevin Butt.” ’s super fan, who is the smartest, nicest person you can think of – we have to really understand what they are doing and how we can help them. They saw our process and loved it. Kevin was the one who handed the award to me. We are all excited.

Previous article: What is this award for?

Riggs: This is a group award recognizing Maritz’s efforts to help increase awareness of their environmental strategies, but it is also an award specific to this specific program. We worked with Toyota and Lexus (Toyota brand) for a while and they always seemed to like the ideas we came up with and this was one of them. They asked us to use the tool to measure their dealer meetings for Lexus, and now we are completing the process and will use the results to show how we can help them design events differently to reduce their environmental impact.

The whole process was a real eye-opener to how forward-thinking car companies can be. In this respect, Toyota is a lot like Maritz. They are very pragmatic and have a lot of very smart people on the team. This is a perfect partnership, similar to the one we have with Mastercard. We are now measuring their conference for the fourth time and it is really exciting to see how they integrate sustainability into their conference strategy. It is interesting to observe the changes in behavior throughout the process.

Previous article: What’s the best place to start to improve meeting sustainability?

Riggs: Everything starts with design. With Mastercard, we step in and proactively measure what customers are currently doing and then make recommendations. When these measures were implemented, they found a reduction in numbers per capita, which was quite alarming. In the third year, we made more design suggestions, they took them to heart, and we got more reductions. Now that we’re in our fourth year, it’s really cool to see it being implemented because they have a specific reason for holding this conference in a specific location, which means they have to design it differently to lower emissions. It’s really exciting to be part of this process.

We now have four or five clients who have adopted what we are doing and incorporated it into their event sustainability policies, which is great. Being able to show something, get people to buy into the idea, and then make meaningful change is very powerful.

Previous post: So you haven’t seen any decline in interest in event sustainability?

Riggs: Not at all – the pace is actually accelerating. I do carbon accounting for all four divisions of Maritz and the number of requests we receive from companies to achieve certain scores in EcoVadis and CDP is increasing. I’m also seeing more inquiries about our carbon measurement tools.

We’re on a good track, which is very encouraging.

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