Interview Series: Denise Lana Molina

This week’s read time: 5 minutes

Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our new bi-weekly feature showcasing conversations with the industry’s leading voices—CSOs, sustainability directors, and other senior professionals shaping the sustainability landscape. Each edition dives into their professional journeys, hands-on insights, and outlook on the challenges and opportunities defining corporate sustainability.

These interviews are designed to be quick, insightful reads, offering you actionable takeaways and a personal glimpse into the people leading the way. Stay tuned for stories, strategies, and lessons that matter to you.

The insights presented in the Green Digest Interview Series are brought to you by a partnership between Green Digest and The Sustainability Circle, the invite-only community empowering senior sustainability leaders through peer-to-peer professional development. Check if you qualify for membership here.

PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Denise Lana Molina

Global Head of Sustainability at Marelli

Denise Lana Molina is the Global Head of Sustainability at Marelli, a leading automotive supplier with 50,000+ employees and 100 manufacturing plants in 20+ countries, serving major automotive manufacturers such as Nissan, VW, Stellantis, and others. She drives Marelli’s global sustainability agenda, leading a team across Japan, Italy, China, and India, designing the strategy, and leading reporting and measurement.

Denise has been instrumental in building the company’s sustainability framework, managing suppliers, customers’ demands and rating agencies, and working closely with the C-suite to establish a unified sustainability strategy across the organization. She also leads the Sustainability Council, represents Marelli in industry bodies, and advises and supports eight business divisions on regulatory trends, compliance, and ESG execution. Previously, she spent 16 years at Schneider Electric, integrating sustainability into core business functions across 100+ countries.

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Can you tell us what was the defining moment that inspired your commitment to sustainability, and how did that shape your trajectory to your current role at Marelli?

I started my career in Brazil, where Sustainability focuses more on social aspects than the environment, as I see in Europe. This triggered my transition from a communications career to a promising unknown area 17 years ago. As I always worked in the manufacturing atmosphere, the defining moment for me was during an early factory visit, during which I saw the impacts of industrial activity firsthand. This experience was eye-opening, making me think about what “planet boundary” and “industrial era” mean. Over the past years, I’ve been working across Latin America, Asia, and Europe, always learning different angles to build effective sustainability strategies. This trajectory ultimately brought me to my current role at Marelli, where I’m committed to leading our sustainable transformation, overseeing a vast auto parts manufacturing operation, and addressing the complex demands of automakers, regulations, and global supply chains.

As Marelli’s Global Head of Sustainability, how do you balance the often-conflicting priorities of innovation, profitability, and environmental stewardship within a global organization? Can you share an example where you had to make a tough call?

Balancing these priorities is indeed challenging, but crucial. It involves aligning our innovation and business goals with environmental stewardship to create synergies rather than conflicts. It's easier saying than doing, though. I can’t remember a tough call in which I had to compromise impact for profitability. Still, I feel tough when I have to postpone or allow a longer time for implementation on urgent topics, like climate change or human rights.

It’s tough for me – on a purpose level – to admit that direction sometimes matters more than speed when we have so many urgent issues to address on a finite planet.

Marelli emphasizes ‘Design for Sustainability’ as part of its strategy. Could you elaborate on what this approach entails and how it influences your product development and innovation processes?

By far, this is the initiative I’m most proud of at Marelli. We have defined the so-called Design for Sustainability. We integrate sustainability from the innovation stages all the way to the development of the products, where we prioritize eco-friendly materials and energy-efficient processes already in the drawings. We apply ESG assessment and resiliency checks to the suppliers nominated in each project. Throughout manufacturing, we aim for resource efficiency and minimal waste generation. We are not yet acting at the end-of-life stage, as this depends on the car-maker specifications, and working with them on that stage should be the natural evolution. This holistic approach is key to embedding sustainability across our diverse product range.

Our sustainability targets are ambitious; by 2025, we aim for 100% of innovation projects to be aligned with Design for Sustainability criteria and 75% of product development projects to implement the same. By 2024, we already surpassed our goals for products in development. By specifying the sustainability elements of design at Marelli, the Design for Sustainability guidelines enable our designers to work across multiple regions and business units while at the same time adhering to the sustainability principles we have established (reduce emissions, replace substances of high concern and ensure resiliency of suppliers working with us). Our business units are equipped with dedicated resources capable of performing carbon footprint calculations. This integration allows us to anticipate the carbon footprint of our bill of materials and production processes during the product development phase, fostering more sustainable designs and production processes.

Automotive supply chains are incredibly complex and global. What steps is Marelli taking to ensure sustainability not just within its operations but across its supply chain, particularly in regions where environmental regulations may be less stringent?

Marelli's approach is centered around collaboration and transparency. We engage closely with suppliers to uphold stringent sustainability standards, even in regions with less stringent regulations. We monitor all suppliers globally and perform assessments and audits to ensure compliance with our standards.

Marelli employs around 50,000 people and operates in 25 countries, each with different regulatory environments, cultural attitudes, and challenges related to sustainability. How do you navigate this complexity to create a unified sustainability strategy that resonates globally while adapting locally?

The starting point was to align the vocabulary.

Our customers do not even adopt the same standards when translating their requests to us. So, harmonizing our overall strategy while accommodating local needs and cultural contexts was pivotal initially. Then, empowering the teams and embedding sustainability leaders within different business areas and geographies helped to create our common vision with local execution in our production sites, ensuring that our strategy is both unified and adaptable.

Geopolitical shifts and trade policies heavily influence the automotive industry. How do you see these dynamics impacting Marelli’s sustainability efforts, and how do you adapt your approach in response?

We used to say at Marelli that green is green, as a reference to the dollar bills. I trust our sustainability strategy is well aligned with our business, and we will adapt to the geopolitical instability. We still believe there’s a right thing to do, and this should not come at an extra cost but should bring us benefits in being more reliable and resilient over time.

What personal practices or philosophies help you stay resilient, and what advice would you give to professionals navigating similar challenges?

It’s an everyday challenge and learning for me to keep my eye on the long horizon and deliver my task list this week. I’m still learning to break big actions into tiny pieces that we can deliver on a quarterly basis; sometimes, I feel it’s not ambitious enough, and other times, I’m happy to celebrate small victories.

Accepting progress over perfection and relentless follow-up to move is as important as the goal of limiting the temperature rising. The journey is long, and we have to get there; nothing can be worse than inaction.

And with these inspiring words, we bring this conversation to a close. A heartfelt thank you to Denise for sharing her wisdom, passion, and invaluable insights with us!

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