Christina Lampert

A More Sustainable Future

With a perspective shaped by her time at Saint Joseph’s, Christina Lampert, BBA ’16, MS, is helping companies build sustainable practices.

Christina Lampert, BBA ’16, MS, had been interning at a fashion company as she worked toward a bachelor’s degree in marketing at Saint Joseph’s, but something wasn’t feeling right. As she learned more about the environmental and social impacts of the fashion industry, inspired by her minor in leadership, ethics and organizational sustainability (LEO), she grew increasingly concerned about contributing to the industry’s harmful practices. When she was offered a full-time job in the company’s marketing and public relations department — her first chance at a job after graduation — she turned it down. She wanted her career to have a positive effect on the world around her.

“I remember bawling my eyes out to my parents thinking that a year earlier this would have been my dream job,” Lampert says.

The decision took an emotional toll on Lampert, she says, but she knew it was the right one. Now, as director of growth and innovation at HowGood, which helps food and beverage companies design, produce and market sustainable products, she is following through on her goal of making a meaningful impact.

Lampert helps companies understand the carbon footprint of the raw ingredients that go into their products — also known as Scope 3 upstream emissions, which often account for more than 80% of a product’s environmental impact — so they can move toward more sustainable methods of production. 

“I never would have done that if it wasn’t for LEO,” Lampert says of her bold early-career decision. “From that program, I really knew in my heart and soul that I wanted to be a force for good within business.”

In her LEO capstone course with the program’s director, Professor Ronald Dufresne, PhD, she studied examples of businesses that were improving their sustainability and benefiting from the process, including automobile manufacturer Subaru, which cut costs as it pursued a zero-waste target, and outdoors brand Patagonia, which fought climate change while also advocating for factory workers’ rights overseas. 

“It was like my brain unlocked,” Lampert says. “It was so clear that it was possible to improve the bottom line of your business while also improving your environmental and social impact on the world.”

Even as a college senior, Lampert’s “maturity, confidence and focus on her core values were admirable,” Dufresne says. Over the course of her time in the LEO program, he saw her develop into a “thoughtful, other-oriented leader.”

“She was then, and remains today, focused on how business could be a force for good — how everyday business and consumer decisions can consider multiple stakeholders and strive to make the better choice,” Dufresne says. 

Much of Lampert’s drive to make a difference stems from an idea she studied in the LEO program known as “servant leadership,” which emphasizes the well-being of those being served.

To that end, she earned a master’s in sustainability management from Columbia University, where she learned technical skills like greenhouse gas accounting and life cycle assessment to calculate the environmental impact of a product across its entire lifespan. She was recruited to HowGood while completing her master’s and has been there for nearly three years encouraging corporate change. All the while, she’s been developing the Sustennial Network, an effort to promote sustainable thinking among millennials across all modes of consumption. She even trademarked the word “sustennial,” a portmanteau of sustainable and millennial, in 2020.

Lampert wants everyone — but especially young people with real sway over corporations — to ask themselves a simple question with powerful implications: “Are you contributing to degenerative consumption habits, or are your habits regenerative and making the market a better place?”

As she points out, millennials’ purchasing decisions are being scrutinized “every single minute of every single day,” and companies are eager to meet consumer demand for ethically sourced and sustainable products. 

“I really believe that consumers and shoppers should be equipped with the information to make decisions more in alignment with their values,” Lampert says. “My hope — and what I'm working to do every single day — is to expose people to information that stopped me in my tracks when I learned it.”

Connect with Christina Lampert.