The Member Spotlight celebrates our members who work tirelessly to advance sustainability at their campuses and in their surrounding communities.
SCA Tissue’s Marketing Manager for Sustainability and Hygiene, Carrie Schuster, grew up in the country spending her days getting her hands dirty in her family’s garden. Her appreciation for the outdoors showed her not only the beauty of the flowers in the garden, but the impact that destruction and pollution could have on the environment too. It was this realization at a young age that spurred Ms. Schuster to pursue a career where she could make a positive impact to advance sustainability.
While newer to SCA, Ms. Schuster wasted no time to get involved in the sustainability initiatives to see where she could support the Tork brand of products. She immediately jumped on board with SCA’s sustainability initiatives that includes collaboration among other global vendors and partners to share wisdom and learn from one another. This wisdom, such as SCA’s closed loop recycling program in North America, is then passed onto customers and explains how SCA can help with their waste reduction efforts by utilizing local production and transportation from SCA’s six regionalized mills to create products made from the customers recycled paper put into the fiber stream.
Ms. Schuster wants to tackle what she views as one of our biggest sustainability challenges, “a lack of understanding in how actions can impact the world around you. It’s important we don’t think that challenges such as climate change won’t impact me” she shared. Campus Sustainability Month is one initiative that Ms. Schuster was most excited to see when she first joined SCA last year. “I like to learn what other institutions are working on to advance sustainability. Higher education are big change agents for our world. If we start by educating students, we create community change agents that will make things happen for future generations,” she said.
While SCA focuses on global hygiene by creating products with sustainability in mind to fit your institution’s needs, Ms. Schuster is focused on providing new resources to help educate her valued customers such as an upcoming revised LEED certification brochure in partnership with USGBC, or a continued focus on how to increase sustainability throughout the organization and in SCA products.
“Sustainability is all over the board and we want to provide tools to help customers. There are so many misconceptions about what sustainability really is. SCA recycles a million tons of paper a year. People still think paper towels are bad because they come from trees. The paper towels we produce are primarily 100% recycled and compostable, and third party certified,” Ms. Schuster emphasized.
What sustainable products do you see around your campus? Do you know how far they traveled to get there? What ideas do you have to advance sustainability?