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David Rinard, Director of Global Environmental Performance
Steelcase Inc.
Location: Steelcase Inc.
STORY/Photo: Joe Boomgaard
Dave Rinard compares becoming more sustainable as a company to being a sound technician at a concert. To get a good mix, you can’t just pull one lever and expect perfect sound.
“You’re looking to create the optimal mix of all properties to achieve the most desirable results,” he said.
As a young chemist, Rinard’s job was to help employers identify and clean up their messes. He was the guy dipping a test tube into the sewers to analyze that the effluent created from the plating process met the wastewater standards of the day.
But as government regulations tightened, Rinard helped convince company leadership that it made business sense to stop the waste in the first place.
“There was a shift toward more product stewardship. It was not enough to design a product and engineer out the pollution. We needed to engineer it in a new way,” Rinard told TBL.
Over a career spanning 32 years at office furniture manufacturer Steelcase, Rinard pushed hard for environmental issues by recasting them as business issues. To do that, he needed to show management how environment issues supported the company’s business – whether by fulfilling a product need for the market, creating high performance workspaces or more simply, making a profit.
That meant, for instance, reframing recycling from being a feel-good practice and instead showing how it contributed to the business of making furniture.
Steelcase had to embrace environmental ideals as part of the fabric of the company if it wanted to both meet customers’ needs and be free of the pressures of regulations. It could no longer just mention environmental/stewardship in its values statement.
When more local companies started to realize the sustainability tide was turning, Rinard and his colleagues wanted to create a bridge between the business and environmental communities so they could sit down across from one another, talk about issues and create shared understanding. Rinard and Steelcase were influential in the early discussions that led to the creation of the West Michigan Sustainable Business Forum.
Although he’s been active in the WMSBF since its founding in 1994, he sees his role evolving. To the new members, he’s now the seasoned veteran implementer of sustainable business processes.
“I bring a perspective, having done this for my working life. When people look ahead and feel overwhelmed by the challenges, I feel an obligation to remind them to look back. The Cuyahoga River was on fire. Lake Erie was dead. Sometimes we measure performance over long time horizons and we feel like there’s so much left to be done. But we need to remember to see how far we’ve come.”
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