Globally, they now hold the majority of leadership roles
in corporate responsibility and sustainability divisions.
This can’t be an accident; a growing wealth of research
shows that businesses with more women in leadership
roles more successfully shift focus from maximizing short-
term profits to achieving longer-term goals of growth and
environmental sustainability. And the bigger the com-
pany, the more this can matter. While we often associate
sustainability with hipster startups hawking felt sneakers
and other eco-friendly products, the most impactful
changes are happening precisely where we don’t often
expect them—at massive global corporations.
Sarah Chandler, the senior director of operations and
environmental issues at Apple, is one such corporate
good citizen leading the charge. She knew she wanted to
work for planet Earth as a high schooler in the early ’90s.
Growing up on a maple-syrup farm in western Massa-
chusetts, she saw how the weather affected production.
“I definitely give my upbringing credit for my profes-
sional aspirations,” she says.
Chandler, who holds an MBA from Stanford Univer-
sity, started at Apple as an intern. It was 2006, and
Greenpeace gave Apple a rating of 2.7 out of 10 for sustain-
ability, citing the company’s use of toxic chemicals, poor
recycling program, and lack of transparency. But over the
past decade, under the leadership of CEO Tim Cook,
Apple has righted its course, reducing carbon emissions
by 64 percent—even while the company’s energy use has
tripled. Today, 100 percent of Apple’s operations—from
data centers to offices and retail stores—are powered
solely by renewable energy. And here’s where that ripple
effect kicks in: Chandler and her team have successfully
lobbied 44 of Apple’s suppliers to commit to using 100
percent renewable energy for their Apple load as well.
Still, there’s much work to be done. Apple sent 36.5
million pounds of waste to landfills in 2018, not to
mention the hazardous manufacturing waste landfills
wouldn’t take (which nearly doubled from 2017 to 2018).
Given increasing demand, the company is searching for
innovative ways to minimize this waste. One such project:
a pair of Apple robots (both named Daisy—one in Austin,
the other in the Netherlands) that disassembled and
recycled a million spent iPhones last year. This recycling,
along with the refurbishment of nearly eight million
devices in 2018, helped divert more than 150 million
pounds of materials from landfills. “You can probably
hear the pride in my voice,” says Chandler of the duo.
Like Apple’s Chandler, Google’s sustainability officer,
Kate Brandt, tackled environmental issues early in her
career. In 2014, she was named the United States’ first
federal chief sustainability officer. A year later, Brandt
moved to Google. In D.C., she saw how much of an impact
she could have in the private sector. Auspiciously, on her
first day on the job in 2015, Google joined with President
Obama and other businesses to launch the American
Business Act on Climate Pledge, a commitment to sup-
port the larger Paris Climate Agreement’s goals for a low-
carbon future, which Brandt had worked on at the White
House. Google has been carbon neutral in its operations—
using as much renewable energy as possible and purchas-
ing carbon offsets to counter the rest—since 2007. But
those offsets don’t technically negate the massive amount
of energy needed to power an estimated 5.5 billion Google
searches each day and over 500 hours of YouTube video
uploads every minute. No wonder one of Brandt’s most
urgent initiatives at Google has been to drive a “circular
economy” that eliminates waste and pollution through
the use of renewable materials across the company’s op-
erations. “Our whole economy since the industrial revolu-
tion has been built on this notion of taking something
out of the ground, manufacturing it into a product, and
eventually throwing it away,” she says. That model won’t
serve the future, so Google now resells millions of used
components, helping to save the company millions of
dollars and keeping materials out of landfills.
Brandt’s strategy is not just to build sustainability into
the company’s internal practices and products but also
to enable the public to make sustainable-living choices
with tools like Google Maps and Project Sunroof. “There’s
a huge sense of urgency. Science tells us we have 10 more
years to turn this all around,” says Brandt, citing a 2018
United Nations report on climate change. That urgency
grows more acute with every environmental protection
the Trump administration rescinds—from drilling and
emissions regulations to energy-efficiency standards.
Google and Apple took a stand in 2017, soon after
President Trump signaled his intention to withdraw the
United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. Along
with leaders from nearly 4,000 public and private entities,
they signed the “We Are Still In” Declaration, vowing a
global effort to hold warming to under 2 degrees Celsius,
with or without federal support.
Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, also signed on. Last fall,
possibly under pressure from nearly 2,000 workers unit-
ed as Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, he commit-
ted to a plan to meet the Paris agreement goals—10 years
ahead of schedule. And in February, Bezos announced he
would be dedicating $10 billion of his personal wealth to
addressing the climate crisis. A key player in the develop-
ment and execution of the Climate Pledge, which com-
mits the company to reaching net-zero carbon through
innovations and investments by 2040, was Kara Hurst,
Amazon’s head of worldwide sustainability.
“I completely geek out on solving this challenge,” says
Hurst, a former CEO of the Sustainability Consortium.
“In small organizations, you don’t have dissimilar prob-
lems, but the scale of the impact of your decisions may
be much less.” Hurst is helping Amazon—a company
widely criticized for adding congestion and heat-trapping
gases to our roads and skies and filling landfills with
shipping materials—to solve challenges including how to
choose the best ways to save energy and resources. With
little time to waste to meet such ambitious goals, Hurst’s
team has pushed such initiatives as the purchase of
100,000 electric delivery vans. The company also launched
a lightweight recyclable padded mailer, helping eliminate
the equivalent of more than 100 billion shipping boxes.
Hurst’s goal is not only to help Amazon become green-
er but also to share the tenets of its success with its many
thousands of vendors. “If Amazon can’t mechanize a strat-
egy for others along the line to replicate,” says Hurst, “it
stops with us. And that’s not a success.”
April 2020 MARIECLAIRE.COM 49
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