Press, publications, and the rooms I have stood in front of.
These span twenty years, and the gap in the middle is real: after 2011 I was running a company, which is heads-down work that does not generate press. I would rather say that plainly than let the dates imply I stopped. What the recent entry shows is the same thread arriving somewhere — an industry consortium, built on our software, agreeing on a standard ahead of the regulation.
Press & publications
UPM · on the Pulp and Paper Value Chain Information System
UPM's account of P&P-VIS, the working group formed by members of CEPI — the Confederation of European Paper Industries — and the European Pulp and Paper Chemicals Group, to standardise how chemical compliance information moves through the pulp and paper value chain. A harmonised questionnaire of more than 150 questions, agreed between companies that compete with one another: UPM, Sappi Europe, Saica, Kemira, Solenis.
My part in it. The article puts it in one line: “The platform is built on software provided by StacksData.” That is my company, and P&P-VIS is the consortium I conceived, built and held together for over a decade — competitors reporting into one shared programme, none of them able to bend it to their own advantage.
UPM's own framing is the part I would point a hiring committee at: the group's work is “ahead of the game, anticipating the EU's likely demand for greater transparency and centralised portals.” An industry agreeing on a method before a regulator compels it is the entire job I want to keep doing.
Andrew Martin · The New York Times · 22 January 2009
The first mainstream reporting on a company putting a carbon number on a supermarket product. PepsiCo had calculated the footprint of a half-gallon of Tropicana at 3.75 pounds of CO2e, and the finding that surprised people was where it came from: roughly sixty per cent was growing the oranges, driven by nitrogen fertiliser, not the factory or the trucks.
My part in it. I am not quoted in this article, and I want to be straightforward about that. I managed the Columbia–PepsiCo partnership behind the work — the Lenfest Center collaboration Columbia named in its own coverage the same day — and I built the life cycle assessment methodology PepsiCo used for its product-level carbon program. The reporting is about the result. I was on the inside of how the number was arrived at.
It is also the clearest public marker of where product carbon accounting stood in 2009, at the moment the GHG Protocol Product Standard and PAS 2050 were being written — both of which I sat in the working groups for.
State of the Planet · Columbia Climate School · 22 January 2009
Columbia's own account of the Tropicana footprint, published the same day, naming the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy as the partner on the project. That partnership is the role I held.
Columbia Climate School · State of the Planet · 1 April 2006
On the partnership between Columbia's Earth Engineering Center and Recyclebank, the startup founded by Ron Gonen and Patrick FitzGerald to pay households for recycling. Chipped bins, trucks fitted with scales and scanners, and per-household weights turned into redeemable credit — measurement as the incentive.
My part in it. I am named and quoted in this one, as an Earth Engineering Center doctoral student and Recyclebank's research director. On what household-level weighing actually gave us: “There's nothing even remotely close to that level of precision in the industry.”
Seventeen years later the same conviction is still the through-line: you cannot manage a materials system you cannot measure, and the measurement is usually the hard part.
Kaufman, Goldstein, Millrath & Themelis · BioCycle · January 2004 · first author
The national survey of where American municipal solid waste actually goes. We rebuilt the methodology around reported tonnage rather than percentages, which changed the answer: 369 million tons generated in 2002, 26.7 per cent recycled or composted, 7.7 per cent to waste-to-energy, and 65.6 per cent landfilled — plus the interstate traffic nobody wanted to look at, including ten million tons a year moving into Pennsylvania.
My part in it. First author. It became a standard reference dataset in U.S. waste policy, and it is the piece of work people in this field still recognise my name from.
Standards & working groups
GHG Protocol Product and Scope 3 Standards
World Resources Institute · working group member
Years spent in the rooms where the rules for product-level carbon accounting were argued out and written, before spending fifteen more building the systems that put them into practice.
PAS 2050
BSI and the Carbon Trust · contributor
The British standard for assessing life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services — the specification underneath the product footprinting work of that era, including Tropicana's.
Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable
Sector guidance · led the GHG Protocol work
Competing beverage companies agreeing on one method for measuring themselves. An early version of the job I have done ever since.
Speaking
A decade of it, mostly in the years when I was carrying methodology into rooms that had to decide whether to adopt it — industry conferences, standards meetings, and other people's classrooms at MIT and Harvard.
| 2012 | Measuring Sustainability of Supply Chains | Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals conference · Mumbai, India |
| 2011 | End of Life Management in LCA | Harvard University, Life Cycle Assessment course (Prof. Gregory Norris) · Cambridge, MA |
| 2010 | The Carbon Trust / BSI PAS 2050 Standard | Sustainability Consortium member meeting · Denver, Colorado |
| 2010 | Carbon Footprinting in the Food Industry | 40th Annual Food Processing Environmental Conference · Whistler, Canada |
| 2009 | LCA and Carbon Footprinting in Industry | MIT, Materials Systems course (Prof. Randolph Kirchain) · Cambridge, MA |
| 2009 | Waste Management and LCA | University of Arkansas / Sustainability Consortium meeting · Fayetteville, Arkansas |
| 2008 | The Development of LCA Standards, from ISO 14040 through the WRI Product Protocol | WRI Greenhouse Gas Protocol stakeholder meeting · London, United Kingdom |
| 2007 | Trends in Solid Waste Generation and Management | Clorox US product managers · Toronto, Canada |
| 2004 | Waste Management in the United States | EPA Roundtable on Recycling Conference · Oakland, California |
Further publications
- Book chapter in Waste to Energy Conversion Technology
Klinghoffer & Castaldi, eds. · 2013 - “Quantifying Sustainability: Industrial Ecology, Materials Flows & Life Cycle Analysis” — book chapter, Handbook of Metropolitan Sustainability
Zeman, ed. · Woodhead Publishing - Draucker, Kaufman & Meinrenken, “Moving Forward on Product Carbon Footprint Standards”
Journal of Industrial Ecology · 2011 · 15(2) 169–171 - “A Screening Life Cycle Metric to Benchmark the Environmental Sustainability of Waste Management Systems”
Environmental Science & Technology · 2010 · 44(15) 5949–5955 - Kaufman & Themelis, “Using a Direct Method to Characterize and Measure Flows of Municipal Solid Waste in the United States”
Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association · 2009 · 59:1386–1390 - “Examination of the Fate of Carbon in Waste Management Systems through Statistical Entropy and Life Cycle Analysis”
Environmental Science & Technology · 2008 · 42(22) 8558–8563 - “The State of Garbage in America 2006”
BioCycle · April 2006 - “10 Things to Know About Life Cycle Assessments”
GreenBiz.com · 19 July 2010
Teaching
Industrial Ecology — graduate seminar, Columbia University
Earth & Environmental Engineering · three years · course evaluation 4.43 / 5.00
I rewrote the curriculum from the bottom up and taught it for three years. In the first year my guest speakers were colleagues from other departments; by the second and third they were economists, academics and industry leaders I had met through the PepsiCo and Carbon Trust work. Standing in front of that room is the part of my career I would most like to do again.
From a fifty-state waste survey in 2004 to a European chemicals consortium two decades later, the through-line has not moved: you cannot manage a materials system you cannot measure, and the measurement is always the hard part. Where that goes next is the fork in the road.