Meredith Lindvall - AVP - Waste, Water & Nature-Biodiversity at Cox Enterprises

Meredith Lindvall earned a BS in Environmental Science and a Master of Public Health in Environmental Health both from Emory University. She has a passion for the relationship between people’s health and their environments that has led to a commitment to careers in the environment. An Atlanta native, she has worked in the health research, environmental and sustainability departments at Emory Pediatric Pulmonology, Delta Air Lines, The Home Depot and Cox Enterprises where she currently serves as the Assistant Vice President of Waste, Water, Nature & Biodiversity. Meredith joined Cox in 2011 and led Cox’s recent industry leading achievement of Zero Waste to Landfill by 2024. She currently serves on the board of LiveThrive Atlanta, who operates the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials, and as Secretary of the Board of the Keep Georgia Beautiful Foundation.

Meredith Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:

• Steps to achieving 90% waste diversion rate
• Employee engagement strategies and initiatives, including translating zero waste to KPIs 
• Cost benefits of moving to zero waste
• Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals
  

Meredith’s Final Five Questions Responses:

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

My advice is to meet people where they are. The reason that's important is because you are trying to gain buy-in. If you can put yourselves in their shoes, figure out why they should care, you can translate sustainability to a really wide range of audiences. Think about, when you're not talking to sustainability professionals, how can you translate what your mission is into a way that this person can be passionate about it? Whether that is a time savings, whether that's that they like to go out on the weekends with their grandkids and learn about the environment, they want to deliver financial savings, they want to have a different relationship with their supplier. I would encourage you to carve out time to think about your audience and meet them where they're at and then bring them on that journey with you.

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

I am excited that the sustainability world is really rapidly expanding past carbon to add things like biodiversity and nature that really, for me, connect our why back to nature and ecosystems and the planet. You heard me say up top that that's really where my passion has been. We're really interconnected, the environment, humans and the planet and species. I'm excited to see biodiversity goals and some of these other things that are really more closely connecting the dots between climate change, species, habitat, and traditional environmental work that, in my opinion, has been a little bit siloed. I'm excited about those coming together.

What is one book you'd recommend sustainability leaders read?

I'm guessing everyone's read Green to Gold, so for a more current one, I would say Drawdown, which builds on Paul Hawkins’ work in the ecology of commerce and really breaks it into truly actionable steps that we as a society can take to combat climate change in the next 50 years.

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

Knowing that your audience are experts in this field, some I'm sure they've been to themselves, but I would say GreenBiz, which is now Trellis, Sustainable Brands, Environment+Energy Leader, in-house tools. Big helpful things for us have been to gamify the actions that we want employees to take. Whether that is an in-house tool or an off the shelf tool, I would just encourage people to look at what can you do to amplify your work given that sustainability teams are often very small. One that I did want to throw out there that folks might not be as familiar with, but again where my passions intersect, is the National Association of Environmental Managers, which really, from my perspective is connecting the environmental health and safety and sustainability work together. As sustainability becomes more regulated and compliance based, I really see a lot of synergy there in that association.

Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Cox?

Listeners can go to coxenterprises.com and look under the Our Impact tab and there you can see our impact report. You'll see a call out on all of our sustainability work where you'll be able to check out the zero waste to landfill achievement, our water work, our carbon work, and then you'll also be able to look at our social impact impact work there as well for 34 by 34. You can find me on LinkedIn, Meredith Lindvall.