Our Sustainability Manager has thoughts, and our sustainability pages have updates
Meet Lauren + our freshly updated SUS report (with nothing sus about it...)
We just gave our sustainability pages a refresh on the site, and rather than walk you through the whole report line by line, since the report itself does that just fine, we figured this was a good moment to introduce the person who’s been quietly running point on a lot of it.
If you haven’t already, meet Lauren
Lauren is our Compliance and Sustainability Manager, which is a title that sounds a little vague until you find out it covers compliance, sustainability, and EHS, all woven together. In her words: “Howdy! I am an Aggie, environmentalist, scientist, and lifelong fan of women’s sports.”
She’s Dallas-born, Texas A&M-educated, and she came to us from Mary Kay’s Product Stewardship team, where she got very comfortable living in the overlap between science, compliance, and sustainability. Now she’s bringing that same mix to Numo.
When we asked her why she chose to do this work with us specifically, she put it like this:
“Many companies are apprehensive about changing their feedstock, making changes, or even talking about sustainability. Numo was forward with their products with data-driven sustainability, transparent as to where they were with their journey, and showed that sustainability is integrated into the business.”
We took that as a pretty nice compliment.
On greenwashing, and how she tells the difference
If you’ve ever had a client wave a brochure at you and ask whether any of the green claims actually mean anything, you already know why we wanted Lauren’s take on this one. Her answer is short, but it doubles as a pretty handy filter.
Q: Greenwashing is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and it’s a word your job basically exists to avoid. How do you personally draw the line between meaningful progress and progress that’s mostly for the marketing deck?
“Sometimes in the sustainability world it is easy to get caught up in just what sounds best. I think the difference between greenwashing and actual progress lies in the data. If a claim lacks tangible supporting data, it isn’t a claim worth making.”
A short test, and a useful one, especially if you’re a distributor fielding sustainability questions from clients who’ve been pitched a few too many “100% eco-friendly” claims with nothing under the hood. The next time something sounds a little too tidy, ask for the data, and see what comes back.
On what she’d want distributors to actually take from the report
We figured the best person to tell distributors what to focus on in the report was the person who lived inside the report for months, so we asked her to pick the one thing she’d want a reader to walk away with. She didn’t love the “one” part, but she answered anyway.
Q: If a distributor reading this only takes one thing away from our report, what do you want that one thing to be?
“Just one? I would love for our customers to take away how many different aspects of sustainability we are paying attention to. Seeing the full picture of people, planet, and product is important in a field where it is easy to focus on a single data point. We are trying to see the whole picture and continuously improve towards being a more responsible business for a more sustainable world.”
The 3 P’s
So with that in mind, here’s the refreshed picture in three quick parts:
People. Our workforce is majority women, top to bottom, and we put real weight behind training, fair pay benchmarks, ethical labor audits, and clear pathways for people to grow into bigger roles.
Planet. Emissions are down, recycled scrap is way up, and our EcoVadis Silver Medal puts us in the top 15% of companies evaluated globally. We also signed on this year as a supporter of the UN Global Compact, which felt like the right public commitment to make.
Product. A big chunk of our portfolio carries recycled or upcycled content, and our Take Back, Upcycling, and GOMI partnership programs keep finding new lives for materials that would otherwise have hit the landfill.
And because Lauren is also a person
When she’s not chasing supplier audits or measuring carbon, Lauren is on a softball, pickleball, or handball court, hiking or camping with her wife and their lab, or watching women’s sports. Her favorite sustainable product is beeswax wrap, which she gives away as gifts. Her quietly held opinion is that anything marketed as “chemical free” deserves a side-eye, since, well, everything is made of chemicals.
For anyone curious about getting into this kind of work, her advice is to stay broad: “Try not to limit yourself to one discipline. Sustainability can be intertwined with so many other jobs.”
Take a look around
The full updated sustainability hub is live on the Numo site, with the latest report sitting right alongside it. If you’ve got clients asking you the hard sustainability questions, this is a good page to bookmark, and Lauren is a good name to know.