Christine Riley Miller is Director of Sustainability at Samsonite where she launched the first-ever global sustainability strategy and program across nine brands. Previously Christine led the sustainability team and the Corporate Foundation for eight years at Dunkin Brands Inc. Prior to Dunkin’ Brands, Christine developed integrated campaigns and strategies for communicating sustainability and philanthropy at Cone Communications. She previously managed the CSR Initiative at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. An engaging public speaker, Christine has been selected as a presenter and panelist on deforestation, coffee, and cocoa including at Citi’s Leadership and Ethics, SPECS, and Innovation Forum conferences. In 2012, Christine was named one of 12 White House Champions of Change for her leadership and influence. She holds a graduate certificate in Leadership for Change from Boston College and a Bachelor’s of Science in Sociology from Brigham Young University.

Christine joins Sustainable Nation to discuss:

• Process of developing a new sustainability strategy 

• Communicating sustainability through the product

• Product take back programs and circularity 

• Approach to addressing climate risks and opportunities

• Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders

Christine's Final Five Questions Responses:

What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?

The one piece of advice that I would say that I've found to be so helpful is rely heavily on internal stakeholder engagement. I've always in my career been either a sole practitioner as I am here at Tumi and Samsonite, or you know, I've had a very small team and you really need to get your colleagues engaged in the work. So, anything that you can do to include your colleagues as part of the development of the strategy, you know, understanding what your issues are, developing the goals and right now we're in the process of determining how we're going to collect and report data to demonstrate progress against those goals. Now, I have to send out a significant amount of surveys with lots of questions and ask them to spend time to provide me with a lot of information. And so I'm following that same process that I used for the materiality assessment and for the strategy development and the goal setting to also do to the data collection. And they all have been part of that process from the beginning, they're already bought into the goals that we're setting and they feel really committed and invested in ensuring that we can report against those goals in a meaningful way, and that they're getting credit for the great work that they're doing. So involving your colleagues in any way that you can, at every step of the process is going to enable you to be so much more successful. I am not an advocate of setting a strategy and then handing it off to people and saying, go do this when they've not had any hand in helping you develop a process, that's actually gonna work for them because if it doesn't work for your colleagues, it's never gonna work for you.

What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability?

I am most excited about the growth in circularity and zero waste. So, you know, we are a consumer goods company. Consumers are always going to buy products. We hope that they always support and buy Tumi products, but at the same time, you know, we want to make sure that we're increasing the circularity of those products, whether we're partnering with other organizations to utilize materials and waste that they have access to that they can't use, whether we're looking at how to minimize the waste within our own manufacturing facilities, working with suppliers to minimize that waste. And then thinking about how do we use materials like the recycled PET so that we are helping to eliminate waste within the existing waste stream and repurposing it. I think that's one of the most exciting conversations that we're having here at Tumi is thinking about how do we design for circularity. How do we use recycled materials and recyclable materials in our products?

I love it. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read?

So the book that I would recommend is not a sustainability book per se, but it is one of my favorite books and I think inspired me to get into the work that I do. And that is the, it's a classic Walden by Henry David Thoreau and in full transparency I did work with the Walden Woods Project and I have lived in the Boston area, very close to Walden, and it is one of my very favorite places in the world. And I think that, you know, it has a lot of valuable messages that really resonate with the work that sustainability professionals do, but it often reminds me everyone should have their Walden. Everyone should have the place that they go, where they can reconnect with what's most important to who they are and what they do. We're quickly losing those places. We're quickly losing the beautiful places of this world. And I think, you know, it's the work that we do, to me, the work that we're really committed to is how do we protect and preserve those places for travelers of today and tomorrow so they can go find their own Walden. Then they can go to a beautiful beach in Bali and it's not covered with plastic bottles, but rather they're carrying a bag that helped divert those plastic bottles from that scene. And so, you know, it really does inspire me to continue to do the work that I do so that everyone can have their own beautiful place like Walden.

What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work?

So I referenced it earlier and I am a big proponent of the materiality assessment. And it's perhaps because, you know, in the work that I've done, I've often come into organizations as the first director of sustainability and I think it's a great tool. One to ensure that we're not talking to ourselves about the issues that are important to us, you know, it enables you to really identify what's most important to your business what's really going to have the most impact. It helps me learn about the organization and the industry as well. If I'm new to that organization and industry, it gives me an excuse to talk to my colleagues and to educate them about sustainability and say, hey, this is the first step you're going to be part of this journey that we're on to develop our sustainability strategy. I'm here to ask you to tell me what you think is most important to our business. And so it also, as you evaluate and revisit the materiality over time, it enables you to really determine what's most important to your business so that you can use your resources wisely. I mean, all of us especially right now, but in particular in sustainability are often resource constrained, whether that's budget or time. And there can be so much noise in the sustainability space that it allows you to really say, these are the issues that we're going to focus on. We're going to focus on, you know, product innovation, we're going to focus on driving supply chain, we're going to focus on carbon action, we're going to focus on people and yeah, there's a lot of other important stuff out there, but this is what we're going to focus on right now. So, I really love the materiality assessment.

And finally, Christine, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Samsonite and Tumi?

https://www.tumi.com/s/about/

https://www.tumi.com/s/sustainability/