It started
in a landfill.

I read International Studies through New College, Hofstra's alternative liberal-arts college. Sophomore year brought the European Odyssey, ten weeks travelling Western Europe meeting academics and politicians while studying a European Union still in its formative years. Brussels made the strongest impression.

Junior year at the University of Amsterdam on scholarship — European history, politics, literature, and my first long stretch living inside another culture. Senior year at Oxford, two trimesters carrying a full year of credit. Afterward, months alone through southwestern Europe and into the Middle East.

Ordered, set up and configured the organization's computers and networks, and tutored international immigrants.

The music deepened here — writing heavily, performing, and eventually running an open mic night in downtown Montpelier. When the bar closed, my restlessness returned.

A deliberate collision of the two things I could not sit still about. Open mics in more than forty cities, plus rural stops wherever I could find a way to play.

It is among the foremost experiences of my life — where I learned my own abilities, how I face a challenge, and how to clear my mind and act on that clarity.

A tiny sublet near my songwriting partner to finish recording two years of songs, playing live as an acoustic duo.

The honest part: pushing the music in front of people was a struggle I did not enjoy, because I was pressuring myself to get discovered rather than enjoying the playing. A lesson that would take decades to learn.

Back in Vermont, rotating through temp jobs, I landed in the office of a waste company sited inside one of its own landfills. I had little prior exposure to environmentalism, and became quickly both enthralled and alarmed. Composting was the catalyst — unfamiliar to me growing up on Long Island, and to my mind the most elegant solution to human organic waste that could exist.

When I looked up and saw the belching methane flares and the line of garbage trucks snaking through windy dirt roads in the lush Vermont forest, my inner passion for these issues was officially ignited.

One morning, doing paperwork in that office with the sun breaking through onto my face, I decided I would start a company collecting food waste from homes and selling the compost back. I would call it the Vermont Compost Company, and believed the idea was mine alone.

On the wall of the same office hung a poster for the Vermont recycling hotline. I called it and described the plan. The woman on the line told me I ought to talk to a man named Karl Hammer in Montpelier — who ran a business called the Vermont Compost Company, doing precisely that. I called Karl the same day. He told me it sounded like I had a calling, and to come visit.

Two years apprenticing on Karl Hammer's composting farm without pay, supported by a part-time office manager role — bookkeeping, grant writing, invoicing, customer relations.

In the yard: Ben & Jerry's ice cream waste, manure of every source, landscaping waste from across central Vermont. I learned to run bucket loaders and their attachments and to drive trucks delivering material across the region, often in punishing winter. On Karl Hammer: one of the most dynamic, intelligent and driven individuals I have ever known.

The capstone was a closed-loop food scrap program the two of us built: laying hens as the seed, restaurant food waste collected at first in my Toyota Camry, the birds eating what they wanted, the remainder composted with their manure, and the eggs sold back to the same restaurants. I wrote and won the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources grant that funded it, and reported tonnages back to the agency.

I had met a woman making goat cheese in northern Vermont who learned it apprenticing in France, and copied the idea outright — signing up for Willing Workers on Organic Farms and enlisting an old French friend from my Amsterdam year to find me a farm.

Six months milking thirty goats and half a dozen cows morning and evening, making the farm's cheeses, selling them at markets in medieval towns. It was also foreign, hard, and isolating. Afterward I travelled south through France and Italy and again through the Middle East until the money ran out.

I found it by cold-calling. Ringing around New York for composting work, I came across a program at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and phoned them; the woman who answered told me Sanitation and the New York Botanical Garden were at that moment starting a Manhattan compost project and looking for someone to run it, and handed me a contact.

I ran it: outreach, education, and experimental composting in one of the densest places in the country, mostly community gardeners learning to compost. What I valued was the range of people it put me in front of, at every socioeconomic level.

It also produced the hinge. Professor Nicholas Themelis of Columbia was exploring an in-vessel composter for the campus. After 9/11 the funding for my position was cut; at a meeting I told Themelis that if they wanted to act they should act soon. Themelis offered me a job on the spot. I counter-proposed coming as a student — and, with no engineering background at all, had to shore up my basic science, sit the GREs, and apply through the normal channels.

VC Paper, an Australian company known in New York for the recycled corrugated cardboard plant it ran on Staten Island, sponsored the degree in exchange for a project: map the flows of waste paper — the plant's feedstock — through New York City, and find the untapped sources.

It took me through the working interior of the city's waste infrastructure and everyone in it: and yes, I mean including the mafia.

It is also where I found life cycle analysis, alongside the material flow analysis I was already using. LCA married the things that drew me to the field — practical and theoretical, hands-on and analytical at once — and became the foundation of everything after.

Joined the recycling-rewards pioneer at its founding. Advised the founders on strategy and on where the company sat within the waste industry, and ran waste characterization studies along Philadelphia collection routes to establish baseline recycling rates for the first municipal pilot.

I used LCA to build a way for cities to quantify how well their waste systems actually perform. The result was Resource Conservation Efficiency: emissions from collecting and treating municipal solid waste measured against the derived minimum possible, expressed as a ratio.

Part of the work was sponsored by EPA Region 9 — and I ended up at ideological odds with my own funder. My conclusion was that, given what cities actually face, waste-to-energy plants are essential: deeply unpopular in the San Francisco-led Region 9 offices. I kept the friendships, and it sharpened my ability to cut through noise and look at a problem as an engineer.

Paul Brunner of TU Vienna, perhaps the world's foremost material flow analysis expert, served as a thesis advisor, and I spent two months in Vienna with his team shoring up the flows work at the centre of the thesis. Defended 2008, three papers published from it.

Of everything at Columbia this is the peak: without a doubt the peak experience and my favorite thing about having studied and worked there.

Themelis had taught the course for years; I rewrote the curriculum from the bottom up. My framing: industrial ecology is the soil out of which LCA grows.

The guest list is my own career in miniature. Year one, mostly colleagues from other academic departments. By years two and three, once my PepsiCo network opened, an all-star roster of economists, academics, and industry leaders. Course evaluation 4.43 / 5.00.

PepsiCo approached the department for help building a life cycle carbon footprint program for its products; I was chosen to lead it. That put me inside the foremost efforts of the moment: World Resources Institute greenhouse gas work and the Carbon Trust's PAS 2050 product footprinting standard.

I sat in working groups for both: my own small contribution to the global standards that everyone recognizes to this day. I also led Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable work on sector-specific GHG Protocol guidance: an early lesson in getting competitors to agree on one method.

I stayed a further year as a postdoc sponsored by PepsiCo, and that period opened the whole world of corporate sustainability to me.

A quasi-governmental for-profit built to grease the wheels for industries trying to cut their climate impact. They owned both the product carbon footprinting program and the PAS 2050 standard guiding it, and PepsiCo was their client — which is how I met them.

I joined to build their product carbon footprinting business across North and South America, and recruited and signed Cargill, Coca-Cola, Walmart, and AMD, among others. It was career-defining, without qualification.

The same wall kept appearing. The GHG Protocol, PAS 2050, the Walmart Sustainability Consortium, individual companies, and the LCA models I ran almost daily — every one needed large volumes of trustworthy, verifiable data, and every one struggled to get it.

Two problems underneath all of it. There was no central place to find the data. And even if there had been, there was no trustworthy or practical way to move it. That is the company.

Fifteen years building supply chain sustainability and compliance software for manufacturers in paper, packaging and chemicals. The work is chemical and materials compliance at substance level: turning customer and regulatory reporting requirements into the requirement sets, supplier disclosures and impact assessments a business unit has to produce. Current customers include Sappi and UPM; the platform scaled past 350 corporate compliance users. I built and managed a team of as many as six in the company's larger era, and carried full financial and operational accountability throughout, reporting to an investor board of two principals holding competing visions for the business.

The work I am proudest of is PPVIS: a two-tier consortium convened by CEPI and the European Pulp and Paper Chemicals Group — competing paper and packaging manufacturers such as Saica, alongside the competing chemical suppliers who serve them, among them Solenis, Kemira and Omya — all reporting into one shared program. It is one piece of more than ten years running shared compliance programs for this value chain. Getting competitors to share data they would rather keep is the hardest and most useful thing I know how to do.

The road does not end at the company. Every stream is still running — field practice, research, the standards work, and the data problem — and they converge on one place: how materials are recovered at the end of their life, and how the rules governing that get written, argued, and met.

What I am looking for is work that uses all of it — end-of-life materials, chemical and materials stewardship, and the circularity and extended producer responsibility rules now reshaping both — somewhere it matters for the next decade.