Voices of Sustainability: Season 2, Episode #1
Hallie Cole
TRT: 17:51
Hello and welcome to the Voices of Sustainability podcast. My name is Halle Cole, and I will be your host and reporter for season two. This season we're looking ahead and continuing the dialogue about sustainability. These episodes feature in-depth conversations with leaders who are helping shape what sustainability will look like in the years to come. I'll be speaking with professionals across fields to highlight the various strategies and challenges faced by the government, businesses, and nonprofits who are all striving to balance economic growth with environmental and social responsibility.
In this episode, I'm joined by Maurie Lawrence, the Sustainability Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Milliken & Company—a leading global manufacturer located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, known for its innovations in textiles, chemicals, floor covering, and healthcare.
Join us as we talk about Milliken's sustainability journey, how they're embedding circularity into their operations, the influence of policy on corporate strategy, and the company's approach to turning climate challenges into opportunities for innovation. Let's get into it.
Hallie Cole
Now, I have done some of my own research, but I was hoping that you, Maurie, could introduce yourself and your role at Milliken
Maurie Lawrence
Sure, thanks for inviting me. As you mentioned, I am the Vice President of Sustainability. I work within the legal team at Milliken in our corporate offices, so looking out across the enterprise efforts. So all of Milliken—A little bit about Milliken, we're headquartered in South Carolina, a material science manufacturing company with operations in the U.S. and abroad. And I help coordinate our sustainability ethics and compliance efforts globally. And it's a pleasure to talk with you today.
Hallie Cole
And it's a pleasure to have you here. So now that everyone has a little bit more context about you and Milliken as a company, I wanted to start us off by asking, how would you define sustainability in your own words?
Maurie Lawrence
I'm going to define it based on how we do at Milliken, but happy to answer other questions too. For us, we have core values, and one of them is sustainability. And that's integral to our business strategy. More specifically, when you think of sustainability, what does that mean? For us, it means to create a healthy future. And that requires thinking beyond just the near-term or short-term impacts. We specifically focus on people, product, planet, and business conduct. And you can find more information on that definition and all kinds of specific information in our sustainability report.
Hallie Cole
And how do you see the concept of sustainability evolving over the next five to ten years, say, for example?
Maurie Lawrence
Yeah, great question. It's definitely just like perhaps everything else evolving and quickly. One of the key changes is the nature of the role that data plays in any kind of sustainability effort. So a team or a leader's ability—or a student's ability—to have access to data—quality data—to know how to extract it, transform it, and load it into a meaningful way to make decisions will be absolutely critical to delivering on sustainability. And with that, And the evolution of the need for data and data science and analytics will be the role that AI plays in sustainability.
So AI has complicated positive and negative impacts. Some people will immediately think of the energy impacts or perhaps potential transition socially in the workforce. But it also plays a key role in that data insights and how to make decisions—not just evolving year over year, but week over week in terms of how it can help you solve problems.
Hallie Cole
Now, you mentioned the possibility of negative impacts that may stem from the incorporation of AI in our lives. And whether you wanted to expand on that idea or add in something else, my next question is actually, what are some of the biggest challenges that your organization is facing on the sustainability front as you guys are looking towards the future?
Maurie Lawrence
Some of the biggest challenges—and we can have a whole podcast just on this—is the lack of clarity that any business faces right now in operating in a complex system. Whether you're talking about tariffs or economic impacts or considerations, or the lack of clarity on what their regulatory frameworks will look like. And then many businesses— if you operate across state lines or as a multinational—then you have the extra layer of the complexity of those environments per jurisdiction. So there's a lack of clarity, which is a huge challenge. There's increasing uncertainty and change. So that lack of clarity, I would say, is accelerating at which the pace and the ability to predict has really—I don't want to say decreased, but the ability to predict the changes that are happening is quite complex.
And then I would say one of our challenges, and I don't think this is unique to Milliken, is competing priorities. Even if you're not talking about natural resources, people resources and allocation of capital resources, they're limited. You have competing amounts of people you can put on a certain project. So how do you prioritize when you have competing priorities? So lack of clarity, increasing uncertainty, and competing priorities, just to name a few challenges.
Hallie Cole
Yes, I can imagine that there are a multitude of them, especially when you consider how many industries Milliken is working across. Now, how does Milliken view these risks when assessing its long-term strategic planning as a company?
Maurie Lawrence
How you assess risk is an evolving process. Companies are getting better at it, and sustainability as a practice area is getting better at it. So there's technical answers, which people could go and look up or study on how to do a climate risk assessment or an enterprise risk assessment, or you can look at data that's disclosed by companies on how they've analyzed their risk and opportunities. From a European perspective, they have a framework where you look at your IROs, or impact, risk, and opportunities. The point being that there are technical ways to consider how to better assess both your risk and the opportunities to impact your strategy.
I think the key aspect that we keep focusing on at Milliken is not to let those risk assessments or opportunity identifications exist in a silo. So you don't want one team just doing it over in an office or an area and not speaking to the core business strategic components. So our risk assessments, climate risk, and compliance risk are integrated into our enterprise risk. And sustainability is integrated into our core business strategy versus running the siloed assessments. And I think that's critical.
Hallie Cole
Now, I'm actually going to switch it up a little bit and go back to something that you mentioned briefly earlier, that being changes in regulation and tariffs, policy, all being a part of the complex system in which organizations such as Milliken operate in. And I was wondering if there were any trends or policies that you see as being particularly influential or on Milliken's forefront today?
Maurie Lawrence
Yes, and a great question. And I would say it's an insight for if you happen to be a business school or students listening to this podcast, that the impact of policies or understanding how to advocate or understand the impact of policies on your businesses is so important, as well as how to have teams that worked well together so that the teams within your business or if you hire external teams that are influencing policy or understanding regulations are integrated well and work well with your operational and strategic functions. It's an exciting time in that while for some areas we're living in a deregulated environment, in certain states and certain countries we're experiencing increasing regulations.
So you have this tension between deregulation and increasing regulations and then how to navigate when you have both occurring at the same time. So some regulation and policy trends that we see that impact Milliken, there does still continue to be increased external sustainability reporting, meaning companies, whether you're public or private, are having to report additional information, integrated information with their financial reporting. So that really shifts the financial landscape in terms of disclosure and ability to get data if you're an investor or a potential employee.
Then there's the increase in all sorts of different circular economy legislation, not just in Europe or Asia, but also in the U.S. In the U.S., we now have seven states with extended producer responsibility requirements on packaging. And you can look at other materials, whether it's textiles or carpets for increasing regulations, either on recyclability or end-of-life requirements. So these are emerging at speed, and any company dealing in the material space will need to understand the impacts.
And finally, there's an increase from a policy perspective—maybe two more. I could go on and on. But another one is supply chain due diligence. That’s whether we're talking about conflict minerals or human rights disclosures or just understanding the risk of your supply chain and the third parties you work with, there's increasing requirements to understand who they are and what due diligence you did on them and how you mitigate those risks. And that's, again, not just in one particular country, but globally, but they don't all agree. So you have to figure out how you're going to comply with, again, shifting and evolving requirements for understanding your supply chain.
And I'd say energy, energy security is a focus in the U.S. at the moment, and there's definitely shifting policy incentives and requirements, whether we're looking at clean energy specifically or renewable energy or the emergence of support re-emergence perhaps for nuclear energy. But the access to energy impacts most businesses and definitely impacts communities. So to the extent that the policy landscape is changing, that's, I'm sure, something that most companies are monitoring, including Milliken.
Hallie Cole
Thank you very much. That was all very insightful. Now, I was hoping to hear your opinion on what sorts of behaviors or mindsets do you think need to shift the most for organizations to truly achieve their long-term sustainability goals?
Maurie Lawrence
I'm not sure that sustainability is unique as compared to if someone was saying what mindset should a business have for just long-term viability, or for a strong business environment, or should communities have to thrive as they look out. But specifically, to answer your question, I think we have to think in terms of systems. So the trade-offs between the choices we're making. Again, whether it's about the raw material choices or where we choose to hire employees or the financial incentives we're creating, there's always a series of trade-offs that then have other consequences.
So how do we increasingly think in terms of systems change is necessary for long-term sustainability? By long-term, I don't mean 15 years. It could be three years in the environment we live and work in. I also think we have to have creativity as a mindset requirement. That could be synonymous with innovation, but really it's about seeing new answers and new ways, being curious of not doing the same thing we did before as we move forward. So that's an important mindset. I mentioned before, but I don't think that we'll be successful without individuals or teams having access to and being comfortable with data. It's just a requirement.
And then the connection between data and communication and our ability to communicate can be quite challenged in this world of social media and different generations with different norms. But the ability to communicate across people and with people is incredibly important. And connected with that, I would say, is the ability to talk to people with different levels of experience, both in terms of quantity, like their level of experience, they're just getting started or they've been working for a long time, but also even specifically from different disciplines.
We need the ability, if you're a business grad, to talk to someone from the engineering school. And those two people really need to be able to talk to someone from an art background on how to storytell. And the magic in finding solutions for long-term sustainability comes in that ability to work really effectively as a team, which is not easy, but all of us are capable of doing if we work on those mindset shifts.
Hallie Cole
You had mentioned how sustainability is one of Milliken's core values and how it is embedded into its daily operations and planning. I just wanted your personal insights as to how you observe this embedment of sustainability at your company and what it might take for other organizations to get to the level that Milliken is at in terms of how integrated sustainability is in its everyday operations.
Maurie Lawrence
Yeah, great question. I think that in many ways, you know it's been operationalized or it has become part of your culture. If it's normalized and you don't necessarily have one sustainability person or one sustainability team, instead it's integrated into both your processes for how you operate your sites, but also how you innovate your innovation teams. how you think about your customer impacts.
So Milliken is on that maturity journey, and it's not a destination for us. So we continue to integrate both from a values perspective in our core values, and we train on it, and it's in our code of conduct. We also then integrate it increasingly into processes. But eventually, you can imagine a landscape where the business itself doesn't even talk about sustainability. It's just integrated into a, we're focused on creating a healthy future. And for us, that means it's just like saying, safety, safety in all we do. It becomes ingrained in how we approach our work. So to your question, I think you have to focus on operationalizing it, putting policies and processes and the right people in place, and then you hope that it just becomes part of your norms. So you almost move beyond the word itself and it matures into just the way of being in the company and we're on that journey.
Hallie Cole
And with that, we have actually made it to the final question of today's episode. I was just wondering if there was any final insight or advice that you'd be willing to share with students or young professionals that are hoping to make a difference in the sustainability space.
Maurie Lawrence
First, congratulations to you for doing this. It takes courage to do a podcast, and you're taking action. I think it's, you know, get in the arena. If you're interested in this, do something to experience it. And get beyond the books and the reports and the research and start taking action because then you learn and you start practicing how to work with people and different teams and different skill sets. We talk a lot about mindset, and you mentioned that, but this adaptable mindset that's willing to see something you didn't see before, understand something differently. The answers are evolving, no one person has all the answers. So we do need an openness to see and understand, and that has to stay present.
I also think it sounds more like a mundane example, but very important, I think developing time management, both of your own personal energy—where you develop and put your energy into as a human being and also energy management, obviously, as a company and community. But basically, you know, I'll say a lot, what we water grows. So to the extent you want sustainability to be a passion area or part of what you do professionally, it's to take a very conscientious approach to what actions am I taking to ensure that I'm doing that? How am I managing my own personal resources and values to align that way? How am I putting myself out there to keep learning and understanding things I didn't understand before? And how do I just get started? Don't let perfect or paralysis of getting started keep you from getting in the game because we need everyone involved to move business and society forward.
Thank you, Maurie Lawrence, for sharing such thoughtful insights on how Milliken and Company approaches sustainability as a core element of his business strategy. Join us next time, where we'll continue exploring the future of sustainability with Todd Marty from Coca-Cola Consolidated. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.