Yalmaz Siddiqui

Biography

Yalmaz Siddiqui has led global environmental strategy at Office Depot since 2006. He sets direction for environmental policy, defines metrics, and helps integrate a wide range of environmental programs into all major functional areas of the global organization. Office Depot’s industry-leading approach spans the entire company – from supply chain to operations to sales – and can be summarized through a global commitment to buy greener, be greener and sell greener. Under Yalmaz’s leadership, Office Depot was ranked America’s greenest large retailer for three consecutive years (2010, 2011 and 2012) by Newsweek magazine, and was also in the top 10 greenest large companies in 2011 and 2012. Yalmaz’s internal role has focused on initiating, integrating and communicating environmental programs that are implemented by Office Depot’s core functions such as merchandising, purchasing, construction and marketing. As a proponent of Customer-Centric Environmental Strategy, Yalmaz also spends a significant amount of time engaging Office Depot customers on environmental needs and goals. His mission is to improve environmental performance of Office Depot and its major customers.

In 2014, Yalmaz took over responsibility for Supplier Diversity Strategy at Office Depot. In that capacity, he will be defining the Company’s go-forward strategy on growing spend and sales associated with diverse suppliers including minority-owned businesses, woman-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses and many others. Part of his role will be to better integrate diversity-oriented thinking into core buying and selling functions at Office Depot in North America and around the world.

Yalmaz came to Office Depot from IBM Consulting where he was a Senior Consultant in Customer Relationship Management, and author of the first global study on environmental purchasing of wood and paper products. Before IBM, he was a management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he focused on the forest, paper and packaging industries. Yalmaz has a Master of Philosophy in Environment & Development from Cambridge University in England where his thesis focused on Industrial Ecology and Life Cycle Analysis. He also has a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Marketing & International Business from McGill University in Canada.

Yalmaz is Founding Chair of the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (purchasingcouncil.org), a multi-stakeholder group working to leverage the power of institutional purchasing to advance sustainability; a Board Member of NACEPT (National Advisory Council on Environmental Policy & Technology), a Board that provides independent advice to the EPA Administrator; and he was the only Private Sector recipient of the Responsible Purchasing Network’s Responsible Purchaser of the Year Award (2009).