Leveraging Procurement to Drive Marriott International's Sustainability

Stephane C Masson, Senior Vice President of Global Procurement at Marriott International

Like many global companies across all industries, Marriott International recognizes that a worldwide sustainability strategy is critical to conducting business and remaining competitive. Marriott has focused on its carbon reduction efforts, targeting Net Zero by 2050. The company has implemented a well-thought-out climate strategy that incorporates key corporate strategies to drive competitiveness, mitigate risk, and deliver value to key stakeholders. As we’ve seen, client and consumer demand is driving a shift in brand loyalty and spending, and companies need to demonstrate transparency in practices, reporting, and outreach relating to ESG. Our Global Procurement organization plays a crucial role in executing foundational strategic objectives and is driving impact at a global scale to ensure Marriott achieves its key targets and timelines across nearly 8800 properties in 139 countries and territories. Marriott took its inaugural steps toward its long-term ESG strategy by launching the Serve 360 program in 2017. We then submitted a commitment to the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) in 2021 and completed a baseline Greenhouse Gas inventory (GHG) the following year to benchmark progress on advancing toward an SBTi goal and timeline. Finally, Marriott engaged properties around the globe to begin tracking Scope 1 & 2 emissions, as well as enlisted its procurement function to reduce Scope 3 emissions, with the supply chain having a high impact and being a key focus area for GHG reduction. We have already seen progress in key KPIs, such as 26.5 percent of eggs purchased are cage-free, as well as 48 percent of paper products FSC certified, both at the end of 2022. In addition, we transitioned to residential-sized bath amenities, which the company expects will prevent around 500 million small bath amenity bottles from going to landfills each year.

Marriott has numerous systems in place to measure property level reporting for Scope 1 & 2 GHG emissions and for Scope 3 in supply chain and procurement around the world to reduce our emissions footprint across dozens of categories. A key area of focus is our responsible sourcing categories, where Marriott International feels it can have a rapid and significant impact relating to numerous key sustainability-focused endpoints, such as animal welfare, sustainable packaging and carbon reduction.

"Marriott International recognizes that a worldwide sustainability strategy is critical to conducting business and remaining competitive"

In addition, Marriott is a co-founding member of the Hospitality Alliance for Responsible Procurement, HARP, because we believe we can achieve results more quickly and effectively by partnering across our industry procurement organizations to adopt sustainable practices across our supply chains worldwide. HARP enlisted Ecovadis as a 3rd party facilitator to guide our supplier engagement strategies while simultaneously sending a market signal to our vendors that we, as a company and industry, are serious about sustainability and ESG.

Other industries and sector initiatives have proven that impact is far greater when peers collaborate to achieve a common goal and see success happen more rapidly. The climate challenges we face as a planet need urgent attention, resources and solutions. Working together as an industry allows us to see things from new perspectives, provide new ideas, and push our industry to do more collectively.

One of our core values at Marriott is to Serve our World. We are proud to be setting a course for long-term success and growth underpinned by critical ESG KPIs, targets, and efforts to help us fulfill the sustainable travel expectations of our guests, customers and associates around the globe.