Life Cycle Services

My lived experience growing up in a rural community showed me the importance of engaging disparate voices in developing sustainable solutions to address our most pressing environmental challenges. Now, as an environmental engineer and policy analyst, I am grateful that I can apply my experience to support a broad range of meaningful work, including advancing a circular economy, supporting clean energy solutions, and community engagement.

Solving today’s complex environmental challenges is a daunting task. It requires the delicate balancing of many competing factors, from cost and convenience to public health protection and resource allocation. At ERG, I am fortunate to be able to work on projects that get to the core of this balance, surrounded by clients and colleagues who are equally passionate about finding mindful, objective solutions for our complex world.

Increasingly, organizations are applying life cycle assessment to learn how they can most effectively reduce the environmental footprint of their products and processes. I take great pride in contributing to techniques and open-source databases that help move the science of LCA forward and facilitate access to more robust, current, and regionalized public life cycle inventory data.

At ERG, I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to work with clients to solve sustainability problems and make our world a better place to live in.

As the song says, ‘you never miss your water ’til your well runs dry.’ I believe that most individuals and organizations generally appreciate that the environment is important but also find it complex, sometimes abstract, and easy to take for granted. I work with clients to promote understanding about how people depend on and affect the environment and to develop practical, affordable solutions that improve the environment now and over the longer term.

Throughout my career, I’ve often worked at the intersection of collaborative science, engineering ingenuity, and societal commitment, witnessing how powerful that can be. As we grapple with changing global conditions and other urgent environmental challenges, we must harness this power to safeguard the delicate balance of our interconnected existence on our planet.

Listening is critical to being an effective consultant. Early in my career as a process engineer, I learned to listen—not just to those in charge, but also to those who focus every day on the challenge at hand. Time and again, careful listening has allowed me to develop better solutions.

To me, working alongside equally driven colleagues, on software that aims to enhance the well-being of our world, is pure joy.

Communicating technical details to a non-technical audience can be one of the biggest challenges in converting research results into meaningful changes. I really enjoy translating complex life cycle assessments into clear messages for clients so that they can make better decisions.

I came to ERG out of graduate school to pursue a career in life cycle assessment with the belief that sustainability has a concrete meaning, one that LCA can help define. To my knowledge, life cycle thinking is one of the best available approaches to assessing the success or failure of human systems and to guiding the evolution of these systems towards an improved balance of environmental and social needs with economic constraints.

The value of a life cycle assessment depends directly on the quality of the data used for modeling. Our LCA staff played a key role in developing the U.S. Life Cycle Inventory Database, which provides free public access to high-quality data on processes and materials. I am very proud of the work we have done—and continue to do—to advance the accessibility and transparency of data needed to support and encourage wider use of LCA.

Growing up on my grandfather’s land in rural Oregon surrounded by forests, streams, and mountains, I developed a deep love for the natural world. That early connection sparked a lifelong commitment to creating positive impact by finding ways to make the things we need without harming the environment I have learned to cherish.

Both companies and the public sector have to assess environmental tradeoffs in the face of limited resources. LCA is a great tool for assessing those tradeoffs and making choices consistent with values. By generating high-quality public data and LCA tools, we provide the underlying data necessary for effective decision-making.