Thomas Stanchak - Director of Sustainability at Stoneweg US

02/09/24 • 35 min

Thomas Stanchak is a seasoned Commercial Real Estate professional with over 20 years of diverse experience. He began his career with his current employer, Stoneweg US in 2017 as an Asset Manager, where he was responsible for overseeing operations, maximizing occupancy, and maintaining budgets for 17 assets in the Midwest region. In 2019, he was promoted to Senior Asset Manager assuming operational responsibility for more than 50% of total AUMs; where his operational leadership was hugely impactful in Stoneweg US’ ability to deliver healthy returns to its investors that year. In 2020, Tom began focusing his efforts on implementing various energy-efficient and innovative practices to his portfolio by introducing water conservation, LED lighting retrofits, and effective recycling methods that would not only incorporate sustainability, but also provide key value-add for residents. Thomas Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Key material ESG issues Stoneweg focuses on Stoneweg’s approach to collecting quality data Evaluation of climate risks and opportunities including climate transition modeling How Stoneweg is preparing for electrification in the industry Thomas’ Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Not everybody is going to agree with you, and not everybody is going to like you, but over time, I've found that if you really work hard and you really do the math around the data and reporting and linking it to finding opportunity, that's the wedge to do things at scale. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? Real time energy monitoring and being able to get responsive feedback from these sorts of technologies as we make improvements. The simple example is, as I change HVAC systems, I can actually see the difference in how the property is functioning. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? I'm thinking more about multifamily and ESG and that place because I'm sort of responsible for encompassing all of those, as many people in my place are. I bought a book called Safe and Sound, it's by a trans woman named Mercury Stardust. The reason I bought this book is that I read in an article that she is a maintenance professional at an apartment community. She wrote this book because people like her or LBGT people often have to overcome an anxiety or a fear of having people come into their homes to even do minor repairs or do services and that sort of thing. It’s a great book because it opened my mind. I have hundreds of people working in our communities. We have tens of thousands of residents. It kind of opened my mind to a perspective that some people, just to ask for their dripping faucet to be fixed, have to overcome an anxiety; will they be accepted? Will they be treated with dignity? I really found a great affinity with this. I felt like I learned something from the article when I bought the book. I think that more people should be more in tune and more focused on the people that they're trying to serve, the people that lease from you and occupy your real estate. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? If everyone is not using Energy Star Portfolio Manager is nuts, because they should be using it. It's something that the DOE and the EPA are really investing in bringing to the next level. We use several softwares for physical climate risk. We use separate softwares for modeling transition risk and finding opportunities to model how our investments are going to change our carbon intensity over time. We use different software for warehousing the enormous amount of data when it comes to having a large real estate portfolio with separate funds and strategies and that sort of thing. In putting all this data together for measuring the success or the shortfall of how we're investing, how it impacts the stated goals in terms of decarbonization or energy efficiency, it’s a number of technologies that we're employing. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the sustainability work being done at Stoneweg US? I'm really proud that we've relaunched our website, https://www.stoneweg.us, and there's an ESG optimization section. This is something that I really worked really hard to provide a deep dive into how we're approaching all the material subjects around ESG and how we're making it tactical, going beyond good intentions. It's something that I'll maintain and share our progress and what we learn over time. Part of that is there's no point in me having a Net Zero portfolio, we all need to do it. That's part of the collaboration and that's why our company makes it front facing on our website.

Previous Episode

Camille Richard - Head of Sustainability at Back Market

Camille Richard is Head of Sustainability at Back Market, the leading marketplace dedicated to refurbished devices and reducing electronics’ negative impact on the environment. She has led the company to become a Mission-Driven Company in 2022 and a B Corp-certified company in 2023. Working in the environmental sector for 10 years, prior to Back Market Camille was Sustainable Performance Manager for Suez, a waste and water recycling company, in Brazil, Mexico, and France. She received in 2021 the Hub35 Sustainable Award from the Hub Institute. Camille Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: How Back Market ensures quality of refurbishers How Back Market communicates and advocates for the Right to Repair movement Efforts to engage suppliers in advancing their sustainability efforts Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Camille’s Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Be pragmatic and patient. When you work in the sustainability department of a company, you may understand that not everybody in the company is as mature as you wish on this topic. Sometimes you need to be ready to take one step backward today to be able to take two steps forward in a year. So it's something that you have to have in mind all the time, and it's not because you have to compromise at some point or that your project is not going to come out at some point. I would say as well to push sustainability strategy as an efficiency factor in the company. As a sustainability professional, working corporate, you are the defender of a long-term vision and it's not always the easy way, but nine times out of ten adopting sustainable practices leads to reduced cost and risks in the company. So you have to be patient and pragmatic and keep pushing it like it's actually what it is, a way to be more efficient and to last longer as a company. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? It's almost like a rising movement around the recognition of the contributions of certain companies like us to the fight against climate change. The recognition of scope four to avoid emissions like we mentioned a bit earlier today. There is more and more investor interest in it, saying that the value of the company is not only about money, but it's also about the impact it's actually generating. So I am very excited to see what is going to happen in the next month and years about that. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? I would say Grow the Pie from Alex Edmond. The idea of the book is to say that creating value is not only about choosing between financial value and the planet and the people, and that a successful company is the one that actually manages to grow the pie for all its stakeholders. A responsible business is actually one that innovates to last longer. I really liked this idea about this book. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? A tool that has helped me a lot and I wish I had known about it when I started at Back Market it's a B Corp self-assessment. It's not a resource per se, but it's a really good tool to run a diagnosis of where you are at in terms of sustainability in your company. What are your strengths? What are your actual weaknesses and what are your progress margins? I would recommend to anyone that wants to start a sustainability approach in their company to run a self-assessment on B Corp. I would say as well, I read a lot of the strategy from the French Agency for Environment that I was mentioning before, because recently they had made a really good one about carbon neutrality that was super interesting. And I look very closely as well as a UN report on waste because of course it's very close to our topic, but I would say mostly the better source of information and good practices for me is to talk with my peers in other companies. Sustainability teams are never huge teams. So it's always very interesting to talk about what you are doing, what are the best practices with people doing your job, but in other companies. So you can actually grab a lot of information and it's super interesting. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Back Market? We are about to launch our corporate website which we are going to feed with a lot of information, but it's not online yet. So I would recommend to follow me on LinkedIn. I'm trying to post regularly. And you can go on our website backmarket.com where we have some information about the company as well.

Next Episode

Norman Vossschulte - Director of Fan Experience & Sustainability at the Philadelphia Eagles

Norman Vossschulte is originally from Berlin, Germany. His culturally rich background included ten years living abroad in Africa, Iraq and Spain before moving back to Germany to finish High School and College. He studied Biology and Physical Science before deciding to move to New York City in 1996 to attend the Herbert Berghof Institute for Fine Theatre Arts and Drama. Norman’s work experience is as eclectic as his upbringing. He has worked in the hotel industry, the non-profit industry, as well as both sports and entertainment industries. 25 years of practicing customer and client relations, has given him an overview of which techniques consistently enhance guest experiences. Norman has over 16 years of staff training and team leadership experience working with The Walt Disney Company and currently the Philadelphia Eagles. In 2014, Norman became the official GO GREEN spokesperson and began leading the green team for the Philadelphia Eagles. During his tenure the Eagles obtained LEED Gold certification and were the first sports team in the world to obtain ISO20121 certification. He organized and re-branded the initiative as the GO GREEN ECO Committee (Engagement, Communication, Operations) to involve the entire organization. One of the main missions of the ECO Committee is to Innovate & Sustain. The Eagles are now the first sports team to actively invest in the ocean by offsetting carbon emissions from player travel by planting sea grass. Norman Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: How the strong sustainability program for the Eagles began and evolved Material issues and initiatives of the Eagles’ sustainability program How the Eagles have achieved 99.9% of waste diversion The approach to engaging fans in sustainability Ideas for making sustainability more mainstream across sports Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals Norman’s Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I love this question. Sustainability professionals are at heart, a lot of the ones I meet at least, scientists. They're folks that have either studied this or are really in tune with some of the data and some of the science behind sustainability. A lot of those folks that really live and breathe sustainability every day, their language doesn't necessarily easily translate into sports because we speak the language of fans and teams. So in the sustainability sector, you have to find people that can bridge that gap and literally put into very simple terms some of these sustainability practices that you are trying to bring to a sports team. Every one of us has to figure out how we can translate a lot of this incredible sustainability language into an everyday language so that everyone will understand it and actions. Because actions have to be taken. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm excited that finally it seems like everyone is talking about it. We have some of our mainstream partners that come to us now and say, “Hey, we want to work with you on sustainability.” That's exciting to me because before that, if you had a sustainability partner that was already working in the sustainability space, of course they would talk about sustainability with you, but mainstream partners necessarily didn't. My biggest excitement is Gen Z, the new generation who are now the majority in the workplace and are the ones that are really pushing this agenda. I don't want them to stop because it's important, and because it's their kids who are going to inherit this planet when a lot of these predictions about climate change are going to come true. Gen Z is really pushing this agenda because they're the consumers, they're the clients now, they're the fans. It's important to us and it's important to them and their generation. They're the information generation that loves to post on social media, and it excites me. I think there's a real movement happening, and I don't want it to stop. What is one book you'd recommend sustainability leaders read? The Routledge Handbook of Sport and Sustainable Development. It basically dives into the United Nations climate pledge document that was written a few years ago that we actually were part of and that a lot of sports leagues and sports teams in the world have signed onto now. It addresses pretty much every area of sustainability, like waste and climate. We wrote one of those chapters in that book. Anthony Bonagura, one of our directors, actually wrote it and I helped a little bit. It was used in college education, but it’s now available for purchase. It dives into a lot of the science and the data, the United Nations force for climate change pledge program that's out there, and that a lot of leagues in the world, including FIFA and the NFL have signed on to. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Our sustai...