Anne Smith, Senior Director of Sustainability at The Heritage Group, shares how we’re turning long-term responsibility into practical action across our portfolio.
At The Heritage Group, sustainability has never been separate from the business. In parts of our portfolio, sustainability is the business. Our companies recover resources, manage waste, and develop solutions to some of industry’s toughest environmental challenges.
Sustainability is also how we do business. This includes how we operate our facilities, use energy and water, manage waste, measure our impact, and make decisions that create value today without losing sight of tomorrow.
We’re not pursuing sustainability because it’s expected. As a fourth-generation family business, we’ve spent nearly a century considering the impact we leave behind across multiple industries.
We Think in Generations
When you’re building something, you intend to pass from one generation to the next, the long term isn’t abstract. It’s how you operate.
Our approach to sustainability begins with a simple idea: leave our people, planet, and communities better than we found them. That means creating safe, inclusive environments where people can thrive. It means taking responsibility for our environmental impact. And it means investing in the communities where we live and work.
It also means recognizing that environmental responsibility and strong business performance don’t have to compete. The best solutions can do both. That’s what we’re working toward.
Measuring greenhouse gas emissions gives our companies better information for decision-making. Reducing our dependence on finite energy sources can lessen both our environmental footprint and operating costs. Finding new uses for materials once considered waste can create value while keeping resources in circulation.
Sustainability becomes most powerful when doing the right thing is also the practical choice.
What We Do
Across our portfolio, decades of experience in environmental services, materials science, infrastructure, and research have given us a dynamic and informed perspective on sustainability.
We understand waste because our businesses manage it, materials because our scientists develop and evaluate them, and infrastructure because our companies build it.
And we understand that solutions must work in practice, not just as concepts developed in a laboratory or presentation. They have to work in plants, quarries, offices, jobsites, and communities.
That experience creates opportunities to connect expertise across our portfolio and tackle challenges in new ways. It means intentionally thinking about how our businesses and products address circularity, waste management, energy efficiency, water, emissions, and decarbonization.
It’s easy to lump these topics together as sustainability buzzwords. But for The Heritage Group, these challenges increasingly represent opportunities to create value, solve problems, and build stronger businesses.
How We Do It
The same thinking applies to our own operations.
At The Center in Indianapolis, our hub for research and collaboration, sustainability is visible throughout our campus. The LEED- and SITES-certified facility incorporates native landscaping, water-management practices, energy-efficiency measures, and waste-reduction strategies into the way the campus operates every day.
That work is never finished.
Maintaining those certifications means continually measuring our performance, questioning our practices, and finding ways to improve. We’re applying what we’ve learned as we bring the same kind of thinking to other facilities across our corporate offices, including pursuing LEED certification at our neighboring campus.
The certifications are one measure. Our goal is better buildings and operating practices, along with lessons we can apply elsewhere in the portfolio.
The same philosophy extends across our businesses.
We’re building repeatable processes to measure greenhouse gas emissions, exploring opportunities in circularity, waste, energy, and water, and working with operating companies to identify practical decarbonization opportunities that could scale across the portfolio.
Not every solution will look the same everywhere. But every business can ask the same question:
How can we leave this better than we found it?
Sustainability is a Team Sport
Like innovation and continuous improvement, sustainability doesn’t belong to one department.
Our Sustainability Council brings together leaders from across the operating companies to share ideas, challenges, and expertise. The goal is to create a community of practice where something learned in one part of the portfolio can create value somewhere else.
Our Sustainability Champions take that idea even further.
They’re employees who see opportunities in the places where they work and decide to do something about them. Sometimes that’s a significant operational change. Other times it’s improving recycling, reducing unnecessary energy use, or reconsidering how materials are discarded.
Individual actions may be small, but together they change habits and operations. Over time, better operations create meaningful, measurable impact.
Make Sustainability Practical
Sustainability can sound complicated. But it doesn’t have to be.
Turn off equipment that doesn’t need to be running. Find a better destination for the material we’re throwing away. Ask whether a process could use less energy or water. Share an idea with someone in another company who has already solved the same problem.
Then measure the result, learn from it, and if it works, find somewhere else it can work, too.
That’s how sustainability becomes more than an initiative – it becomes part of how we operate.
For nearly a century, we have built businesses with the next generation in mind. Sustainability asks us to keep doing exactly that: using the experience, ingenuity, and reach of our portfolio to create businesses that are stronger because they’re responsible.
What we do, how we do it, and what we leave behind – that’s how we think about sustainability.
