Camille Richard - Head of Sustainability at Back Market

Sustainable Nation

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.