Amelis Long: Welcome back to The Vault. I'm your host today, Amelis Long, and I'm so excited to dive in to today's topic about building a more sustainable future.

At FNBO, sustainability isn't just a goal. It's a long-term commitment. And behind that work is a dedicated team working on making meaningful and measurable progress.

Today, I'm so excited to welcome our guest, Tim Malik, Senior Director, Facilities and Property Management, leading that sustainability charge. Tim, welcome to the podcast.

Tim Malik: It's great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation.

Amelis Long: Yeah, I'm so excited. We've had the opportunity to chat about sustainability many times, especially in recent months, so I'm so excited to bring our conversation to our audience today.

Let's start by talking a little bit about what is sustainability?

Tim Malik: Sure, and that's a great place to start. Managing the real estate, our responsibilities are to the utilities we consume. So that's the utilities we purchase from companies, the water we consume to irrigate and take care of occupants, and also to manage the waste streams that we create. So that's really the basis of the focus that we've taken on this topic here at First National.

Amelis Long: So how did we get to where we are now? Why do it?

Tim Malik: Yeah. You know, about 10 years ago, we realized that some of the shifts in our investment were really driving operational efficiencies and lowering operational costs, but we didn't really have enough data to drive the next decisions that we needed to make. So, through a relationship with a local environmental consultant, we put together a goal-setting process with leaders of the bank to really sit down and take a look at this data and define clear pathways that were realistic, time-bound, we could fund them, et cetera, that we could commit to.

So, the result of that work was we set three goals that were all time bound by 2035. The first goal is to be net-zero, Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions.

Second goal is to have a 90% waste diversion rate in our corporate buildings, and the third goal is to reduce our water consumption by 20% annually.

Amelis Long: Okay, I definitely want to unpack those goals, but I also want to acknowledge what an intention is for financial institution to stop and take a minute and look at that data and think, what can we do better and what can we do more efficiently?

Tim Malik: And I think it's embedded in our culture, in our compass. You know, Bruce Lauritzen said, when our communities do well, the bank does well. When we take care of the communities through our environmental sustainability efforts, we're embodying that statement.

Amelis Long: Tim, let's talk a little bit about the significant progress your team's made over the last several years.

Tim Malik: Absolutely. So, five years into our goals. We published them in 2020, their time-bound by 2035, we have reached a couple of really big milestones.

So, a progress update on where we're at. We've achieved a 55% reduction in our Scope1 and 2 emissions at the end of 2025. We've achieved a 90% waste aversion rate in our Tower and Technology Center building, and we've achieved a 22% in water conservation, uh, versus our baseline in the year 2025.

Amelis Long: Tim, that's amazing. I feel like I need applause in the background here, but congratulations. That's a huge accomplishment.

Tim Malik: It takes efforts from everyone to get that accomplished.

Amelis Long: Give me a visual for what that really means for the audience.

Tim Malik: Yeah, sometimes that data is hard to wrap your mind around. So, in 2025, our impact is the equivalent of taking 6,700 cars off the road, and on average of 10,000 to 12,000 miles a year, that's 75,000,000 miles driven.

Um, waste diversion. The waste that we diverted in 2025 is the equivalent of 19 fully loaded commercial garbage trucks, weighing approximately 25 tons each.

And our water consumption efforts in 2025 was the equivalent of 25 Olympic swimming pools.

Amelis Long: That's all in one year?

Tim Malik: In one year.

Amelis Long: That's incredible.

Tim Malik: If you go back to when we set our goals 5 years ago, the equivalency of electricity that we've reduced is 70 gigawatt hours, which is the equivalency of the amount of electricity the Tower uses in 8.5 years.

Amelis Long: Wow. And for reference, if folks don't know the tower, that's a forty-story building.

Tim Malik: forty-story building. And waste aversion, this one is pretty impactful, we've diverted the equivalent waste of a four-story building the size of a football field from going to the landfill.

Amelis Long: That's an amazing, that's just amazing progress. So, let's circle back to those goals a little bit more. So, goal number one, you talked about being net-zero as Scope 1 and 2. I'm guessing most of the audience doesn't know what that is. So, explain that for us.

Tim Malik: Yeah, so um there's a lot to unpack there. So, let's talk let's talk about emissions for just a second. So, Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions are the emissions that are created by the utilities you purchase and consume or the fuels that you use on site or maybe in your fleet vehicles. So that's Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions.

Um, you know, at really basic terms, it is the natural gas that we purchase and use, the electricity that we purchase and use, and then we also use chilled water and steam in our corporate campus in downtown Omaha. And then the fuels that we use are the gas in our fleet vehicles, and then the diesel that we run in our generators. So that's really what encompasses the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.

Net-zero is a term that identifies a progress goal that is approaching zero emissions. Um, so once you've done everything that you can as an organization and influenced as much as you can uh, with utility companies with how they generate, uh, the electricity or the utilities that you consume, you approach net-zero, um, on your emissions.

Amelis Long: Okay.

Tim Malik: So, our second goal was 90% waste diversion rate in our corporate buildings. And simply what that means is our goal was to divert 90% of our waste from going to the landfill. Um, and we did that by conducting a waste audit a few years ago in our corporate buildings and in a couple branches. And literally what a waste audit is, is we collect our waste, we take it down to the dock where we can sort it and weigh it by the category that the waste is. And it's not an easy process, and it takes a group of people.

Amelis Long: I Imagine also maybe not the funnest process.

Tim Malik: But it's definitely true that you can learn a lot by going through the waste.

Amelis Long: I can only, only imagine the stories you and your team have.

Tim Malik: So, what we learned is that before that, we were only managing a couple of streams. Mixed recycling, everybody's familiar with mixed recycling. It's your recyclable plastics, aluminum cans, things of that nature, and then paper and cardboard. But we learned that there were a couple other streams that we could easily manage in our corporate buildings and one of them is compost. And the other one is called Energy Bag. And we had to learn a little bit about those streams and actually create some relationships with some recyclers in Omaha that we hadn't worked with in the past. Um, but then what we did is we defined a new waste diversion program and educated our employees in our corporate buildings on what that was going to look like and how it was going to impact their behaviors in the buildings and then rolled out the program. And really what it did is it turned our waste stream and how we managed them on its head. We turned it upside down.

Amelis Long: It sure did. I think your favorite question is, where's my trash can?

Tim Malik: Where's your trash can, yeah. So, one of the things was through a centralized waste diversion program, we have bins place strategically throughout our environment to minimize the number of times we sort waste. There are a lot of studies that show the more opportunities you give building occupants to store waste; you actually erode your diversion rate. One of those things required us to remove trash cans from under desks.

We tried to, you know, have a strong ground game and go out and talk to employees and really explain the why before we made the change. And you'd be surprised at how quickly we found advocates that helped us build momentum to make that happen.

So we went to the source, the procurement process on some of these streams, and we eliminated the Styrofoam from the catalog where you order cups and things of that nature, and single-use utensils were replaced with compostable single-use utensils. And then we changed the visuals of the signs on the waste streams to really make the experience for the employee very simple.

And what we were literally able to do was take our largest waste stream that left in a huge compactor that was always landfill and replace that stream with our mixed recycling and our energy bag in that large container.

Now our landfill leaves in the same size container that you put it the curb once a week to have your trash hauler pickup. They're the 96 gallon rolling totes for landfill. The majority of our waste leaves through the compactor, and now it's mixed recycling and energy bag.

Amelis long: Let's get back to goal number three. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Tim Malik: Sure. Our third goal was to reduce our water consumption by 20%. And honestly, early on in our process, I really thought that maybe that was going to be the hardest one to achieve, and it may still prove to be the most challenging. And some of that's because when we started collecting data, we learned that 67% of our water consumption as a company is irrigation. And when you have over 100 branches, there's a lot of square feet of turf figuring out how you can reduce your water consumption by 20%, when you know you have to irrigate that, to keep it alive, can be quite a challenge.

Amelis Long: Yeah, for sure. I can only imagine thinking about my own lawn and how much that is. So, what are the some of those things that your team is doing that's really innovating this space? That's kind of contributing to those progress.

Tim Malik: Yeah, sure. Some of the contributing initiatives that have been the most impactful are in mechanical and electrical upgrades to our buildings. So again, coming back to real estate, how we heat and cool our buildings, how we consume utilities. We've really shifted our approach in how we handle lifecycle replacement of equipment. It would be really easy when a piece of equipment, um, failed or was approaching end of life to just replace it with what was there. The same design. It fits easy, sometimes it could be the fastest way to get it accomplished, but it's not always the most efficient. It doesn't always lower our operating expenses or the emissions that we create.

Some good examples of that is in our air handlers in our corporate buildings. And in original designs a couple of decades ago, those air handlers had a huge electric motor that ran, it was either on or off. So, what we've done is at lifecycle replacement, we've installed fan arrays. And those fans in that array, they work together to balance the demand of the building at all times. That makes us very efficient in how we heat and cool our buildings. We're consuming less utility, which then costs us less money.

Amelis Long: All these things happening behind the scenes, that most employees or most visitors to our buildings wouldn't even think about.

Tim Malik: Yeah, absolutely. There are things that people see. You know, example of things that people see when they're in our environment is the intentional redesign of Tower transformation and how we work, modern flexible workspace has allowed us to change how we use our real estate. We've been able to reduce the square footage necessary to give people an environment to still get the same amount, if not more work done.

We've also invested in technologies that you'll see in this space like LED lighting. And the technology that comes along with that are things like light harvesting and occupancy sensors. So, if you're in the Tower, um, and especially on the south side of the building that gets most of the sunlight, you'll see throughout the day, that the perimeter lighting will dim as the sun moves across the building. Um, and then if you're in the building later in the evenings, you'll see that the occupancy sensors start to do their work. We no longer rely on someone to shut the switch off every day when they leave the area for their lights to go off. The occupancy sensors know when people are in the buildings, and they do that for us now. It's much more efficient.

Amelis Long: I remember those days of my dad being like, "turn the lights off, turn the lights off" and really to have the technology that allows us to not think about that, but also, again, contributing to that progress, uh, and those goals.

Tim Malik: Yeah absolutely. Our mechanical systems also have smart controllers. Let's call them that behind them. And what that is, is we can program these systems to set the temperatures back when the buildings aren't occupied and then bring the temperatures back to where we want them to be before a building would be occupied. And we can also protect ourselves and our air quality within the buildings when things happen like wildfires where the smoke is degrading the quality of the outside air and these systems give us the ability to do this in real time.

But there are a lot of other things that we're doing to impact our water consumption. One of them is installing technology that's called a smart irrigation system. And really what that is, is it's a controller that is connected to the local weather station, and it manages how it irrigates, like you and I would balance a checkbook. Rainy day is a deposit, a dry day is a withdrawal. It balances those two and decides when to irrigate. The nice thing about them is when you have a spring like we had last year, they skip an awful lot of cycles. Without that technology, we would have had irrigation systems running while it was raining outside. That's one of the biggest ways that we can make an impact in how we irrigate.

Amelis Long: So, I know from visiting some of my favorite branches, I've noticed some changes on the outside, and I think they're probably related to the water consumption goals. Can you speak to those a little bit?

Tim Malik: Some of the things that we're doing to impact our water consumption, aside from the technology in the smart irrigation system, is intentionally redesigning our properties. You know, a lot of landscaping does age out. And when we have opportunities to start replacing or redesigning on those properties, what we've done is intentionally reduced the square footage of turf by expanding the hardscapes. So, you're seeing less turf, you're seeing more mulch, more rock.

One of the transitions you'll see is away from annual tropicals and a shift towards native perennials. And the impactful part of that is a tropical plant requires a lot of irrigation. They're not native here. A perennial plant comes back year after year. It doesn't have to be replaced like a tropical, and it doesn't require as much water. It's drought tolerant. So that combination of shifts in the design with the technology of the smart irrigation system is really starting to show us and provide us data that we can actually get from the smart irrigation system towards the goal of reducing our water consumption by 20%.

Amelis Long: And you're not losing the aesthetic. It's still beautiful.

Tim Malik: Yeah, absolutely. It's really surprising when you intentionally redesign landscaping, a lot of the native perennials that we, um, we have growing naturally here in Nebraska when you design a landscape around those, you can maintain the same aesthetic, the same curb appeal that you did with the tropicals.

Amelis Long: As we continue to think towards the future, what are some of the things that you anticipate being a challenge or things that you're maybe have top of mind in that regard?

Tim Malik: Yeah. I think the biggest challenge is going to be continuing to make progress towards our goals as the organization grows. A good example of this is how we approach real estate rationalization. How can we serve our customers with less square foot as we move forward? Um, you know, 10 years ago, we spent about $10,000,000 on utilities every year. We've reduced that or we're approaching a reduction of about $2,000,000 a year in operating expense, all while the bank has grown about $10,000,000 in assets.

Amelis Long: That's impressive, Tim. We've certainly grown a lot over the last few years, so to continue to make that kind of progress and significant progress at millions of dollars is just really impressive for your team.

Obviously, this is work that matters really deeply here at FNBO, and that's shown by all the progress you've made and those intentional choices your team has applied. Why does this matter beyond our walls here?

Tim Malik: Great question. We're making a positive impact in the environment, which also includes the communities in which we live and where we serve.

Amelis Long: I mean, this is where we live and work, right? So why wouldn't we want to want to put it in our efforts like that?

Tim Malik: Absolutely.

Amelis Long: So, if we think about all the progress you've made, what's next on the horizon? Where do you want to go next with these sustainability goals? I know you got that 2035, so you're not done. But what are we looking for next?

Tim Malik: Yeah there's a lot of work left to do, but you know that's part of the fun part. My team loves continued education. We're always looking for new technologies for new innovations. We've built great relationships across our enterprise with partners, whether it's our mechanical and electrical engineers and contractors, whether it's our environmental consultants, and we challenge them. We challenge them to make us better. We challenge them to provide us more options. And, you know, they're really helping us along the way. So, there's always something new out there that we can learn. Um, and I think that's probably one of the most fun things about uh, what's next is the technology that we need to get to our goals is probably being developed today or maybe in the near future.

Amelis Long: We have we as employees, you've created a framework for us, right? We have the tools in which to do our waste diversion, we have the opportunities to learn with you and your team. But if I'm watching at home, I'm thinking, where do I even, where do I even start? Like, what are some tips for the audience that they can take away?

Tim Malik: Yeah, um, some of these things you're probably doing without realizing yet, and they are small habits that can be built upon. For example, LED light bulbs in your house. Technology has driven us to that, but every time that you replace an LED light bulb with an old technology, you're improving the efficiency of that individual fixture by 50%. Um, also, even though they cost a little bit more upfront, they're going to last a lot longer, and nobody has to get on a ladder every month or two and replace an incandescent bulb anymore.

Um, other things are just small habits, you know, making sure that you're not leaving the water on, that you're not leaving lights on. Um, you know, there's also technology that's becoming more affordable. I've talked about smart irrigation systems, and I've talked about smart mechanical systems, but that technology is available on a more economical level than it ever has been in the past. A lot of people can start replacing their irrigation controllers at home with a smart system that will hook up to your home Wi-Fi and monitor the weather and save you water. Same thing with your HVAC system at home. Now the cost of energy isn't going to go down. And as the cost of energy goes up, um, and you have to replace these devices, you can replace them with smarter devices, you can hedge against some of those increases and energy costs in your own home.

Amelis Long: Well Tim, this has been a great conversation about sustainability. I always learn so much when you go over your updates and all the progress you and your team has made. So, thank you so much for being here.

Tim Malik: Yeah, thank you. I Appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation. There's always something new going on. There's always new challenges to overcome, and it does take all of us.

Amelis Long: Thank you so much, Tim. So appreciate you being here. And thank you to all for watching another episode of The Vault. To learn more about our sustainability efforts, you can read our impact report on fnbo.com, and we'll see you next time.