Attending the Sustainability Summit

Last week I had the honor of attending Stericycle’s Sustainability Summit in Aventura, Florida. Alex Chapman, Compliance and Sustainability Leader with Stericycle highlights my attendance below:

This week, Elizabeth Joseph and David Zechman, BSE, MPA, LFACHE spoke at Stericycle’s Sustainability Summit in Aventura, Florida, sharing their experience and lessons learned around sustainability initiatives and how to gain executive leadership buy in and support.

Elizabeth provided context of the impacts of climate change to population health and covered some of the initiatives her organization (Jackson Health) have done to reduce environmental impact, including through waste reduction, purchasing, and moving to reusable materials. Her passion, how they overcame challenges, and their results were great to learn and hear about.

David shared his principles of being a successful servant leader, including examples. He also talked to the challenges of implementing sustainability programs.

When we pitch sustainable waste programming, David outlined how a defined strategy and business case including financial components, ROI, partnerships, and “doing the right thing” will help gain executive buy in. It is difficult at times to make a quantifiable correlation between executive focus areas, such as population health, and waste. It is important to ensure you have the correct stakeholders involved for funding and long term program success.

Grass roots is where most opportunities build from and as momentum builds, ensuring all the correct stakeholders are involved is very important to success as both David and Liz discussed, including with example. Thanks Liz and David for your time and insights this week! And thanks to those who came and participated - I really enjoyed meeting, learning from, and talking with you!

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