When George Milner was hired at Mohawk Fine Papers Inc. in the early 1970s, he was thought of as the “compliance guy,” he says. Soon after that, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, and resource-intensive manufacturers such as Mohawk, a $78 million maker of premium paper, needed to figure out how to meet the letter of the law.
“Then the attitude was, ‘We really didn’t want to hire you, but we had to,’ ” Milner remembers. “My job basically was to keep the sheriff from knocking on the door. And they told me, ‘Don’t spend any money doing it.’ ”
Today, a lot has changed at Mohawk. Milner is now the company’s senior vice president for environmental affairs, overseeing its energy and environmental management activities. His staff is responsible for implementing plans for reducing energy use and emissions, and for risk management analysis of the chemicals and other potentially dangerous materials Mohawk uses to engineer and produce its products. His team has the power to ban materials from use in Mohawk’s three plants. And whenever Mohawk is considering acquiring another company, Milner’s team is called in to assess the potential target in terms of its environmental impacts and risks. Most importantly, Milner enlists top executives and their teams across Mohawk to formulate and implement the company’s comprehensive environmental strategy.
“Now, rather than saying, ‘We have a compliance guy whose responsibility is to report these risks,’ we say, ‘We have an engineering department, and directors, and top executives who create and support a comprehensive sustainability plan. It’s the difference between managing an [environmental health and safety] function and becoming a sustainable business,” Milner says.