The 2016 GreenBiz 30 under 30
These emerging leaders aren't necessarily on the C-suite track; some aren't even on the CEO’s radar. But that doesn't mean they aren't making a difference. Read More
Corporate sustainability professionals take many paths to the job, and their jobs take many forms. Most aren’t on the C-suite track; some aren’t even on the CEO’s radar. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t making a difference.
These emerging leaders, all of them twentysomethings, are tackling some of the toughest challenges in business, from inside big companies, at the helm of startups or in the nonprofit sector. Whether they’re already seasoned and celebrated, or just seeding a standout career, watch them grow from here. A desire many of our honorees expressed: for sustainability to be part and parcel of how every business operates.
Here, in alpabetical order, are 30 of today’s — and tomorrow’s — best and brightest.
1. Elizabeth Barthelmes, 27
Sustainability Manager, Etsy; Brooklyn, New York
Elizabeth Barthelmes credits a seventh-grade science project as the inspiration for her career. The focus: researching fly-ash contamination in Wenham Lake, a reservoir north of Boston that was once so renowned for its purity that Queen Victoria purportedly used it as a source for ice. The lax regulations and corporate policies that led to its deterioration got her interested in environmental law.
She refined that focus during her junior year at Boston College as a student delegate to COP15, the United Nations climate meetings in Copenhagen. “Everything kept pointing back to the business world being able to make changes quickly,” she said.
Barthelmes’ first job centered on employee engagement for financial services firm Sungard, now part of FIS. She made the leap in May 2015 to Etsy, where she focuses on helping the craft marketplace pursue a Living Building Challenge Petal Certification. Barthelmes also found the time to create a local forum for discussing sustainable business best practices, the New York Area Sustainability Group. That community has mushroomed to more than 300 members.
“On a personal level, I’m proud that I’ve learned to have hard conversations with a lot of diverse stakeholders who don’t always believe in sustainability,” Barthelmes said. “Or if they believe it, don’t quite understand it yet.”
2. Kelly Elizabeth Behrend, 27
Director of Strategy and Sustainability, RIDE; New York City
What does installing solar panels in Caribbean nations have to do with an app that brings carpooling into the 21st century? If you ask Kelly Elizabeth Behrend, who leads sustainability at the on-demand commuter carpooling company Ride, both approaches have a starring role to play in the transition to a clean economy.
“In college I was quite the hippie,” said Behrend, who started her career with the nonprofit Peacework after graduating magna cum laude in international studies at the University of Richmond. “The more that I got into the social side, I realized how much the environment is impacting communities around the world.”
Behrend considers her strength “social impact strategy,” working to meld her nonprofit roots with a business mentality to make sustainability a focal point of private-sector endeavors.
The transportation sector’s disproportionate contributions to climate change — 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions as of 2010, according to federal estimates — made Ride an appealing venue for Behrend to put that sentiment into action.
“If you get the right sustainability-minded people into roles around strategy, that’s when we’ll see the needle start to move,” she said.
3. Patrick Bloss, 26
Mechanical Quality Engineer, Apple; Cupertino, California
Brand new on the job, Patrick Bloss figured out how to streamline manufacturing of transmission components at a Ford Motor factory to reduce scrap costs by 46 percent. He then developed a process to extend tool life eightfold, and drove the welding operation to achieve its first 100 percent quality audit score.
Those results attracted attention beyond Ford. Indeed, Apple recruited him this month. Days before publication of this list, he spoke to GreenBiz from Shanghai, his first trip on official business with Apple.
The Fort Wayne, Indiana, native understands that efficiency means cost savings — in an uncanny way that belies his 26 years-of-age and few years in the business world.
“Efficiencies are beneficial all around and really cost driven,” says the mechanical engineering graduate from Purdue University. So on his assembly lines at Ford’s Sharonville, Ohio, plant, “I looked at where the process was losing money and that led to where inefficiencies were.”
“As my generation starts to move up in companies, sustainability will turn from a single arm of an organization to this kind of thing that is pervasive through an entire company,” said Bloss, who names his mother, a controls engineer, as his biggest influence.
4. Sasha Calder, 25
Corporate Social Responsibility and Engagement, Josie Maran Cosmetics; Hollywood, California
At luxury cosmetics brand Josie Maran, Sasha Calder leads social and environmental sustainability programs. That includes sourcing argan oil from women-owned cooperatives in Morocco, then designing low-waste product formulations and packaging. She’s also charged with creating a brand strategy to rethink beauty as a healthy and empowering force.
Calder is heavily engaged in Josie Maran’s “Reinventing The Planet” fund, a $100-million strategy that reinvests cosmetics earnings by partnering with initiatives around women’s empowerment, climate change and social entrepreneurship.
She envisions her role as “being the voice of intentionality in the room” that encourages coworkers to understand what it means to produce and sell a socially responsible, environmentally sustainable product.
Having parents who left apartheid-era South Africa for Los Angeles, Calder said she developed an early awareness of “structural inequality.” She studied cultural anthropology and finance at U.C.-Santa Cruz, and holds a Masters degree from the U.N. Mandated University for Peace.
“I think that the younger, ’30 under 30′ voice is one that is committed to radical hope and optimism in a way that we haven’t seen before in the corporate space,” Calder said.
5. Chris Castro, 27
Community Energy Manager and Advisor, City of Orlando, Florida
An average week — particularly one that includes adequate sleep — is not easy to nail down for Chris Castro. As the senior energy advisor to Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, Castro has been arranging pilots of solar-powered self-driving cars on NASA runways and overhauling building efficiency standards. He’s also grown the community action nonprofit he started in college, IDEAS For Us, to 200-plus chapters while scaling an innovative lawn-to-organic-farm conversion program, Fleet Farming. Castro even squeezed in a keynote at the United Nations Rio+20 summit a few years ago.
“During the day, I’m working here full time in City Hall,” he said. “In the evening and on the weekend… it’s more boots on the ground.”
Castro, who is from Miami, has a unique vantage point. Orlando has a public focus on climate action, yet Florida lawmakers have been barred from discussing climate change — and he has become an evangelist for localized action.
“Our state legislatures and elected officials don’t believe in science,” Castro said. “They are trying to maintain the status quo and halt any progress toward a clean economy.” Through efforts like Fleet Farming and the city’s recent $17 million green bond, he hopes to make Orlando part of a solution that includes business, government, academia and local residents.
6. Prerna Chatterjee, 26
Sustainability Specialist, BASF North America; Florham Park, New Jersey
In her first job after college, Prerna Chatterjee recognized what most businesses don’t yet understand and her own employer, Oerlikon, didn’t see until she pointed it out: the business value of sustainability. She calculated that the energy savings in how Oerlikon’s newest products were manufactured cut carbon emissions by 26 percent — and furthermore, how that data could garner commensurate value in the marketplace.
“When I started my career, sustainability was a field where the tangibility and profitability of a business were perpetually questioned,” she said.
Now she’s changing that. At BASF, she helps customers identify and pursue sustainability opportunities. She created a webinar series called “$u$tainability Win$.”
“Prerna’s managerial skills and technical background help this young sustainability champion hunt, seek and drive business opportunities through the lens of sustainability,” says one of her supervisors.
While a Columbia University graduate intern at Dow Chemical, Chatterjee did lifecycle analyses (LCAs) on the company’s Styrofoam plants, which Dow published as an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).
She said she’s determined to make environmental benchmarking the norm. “Just as every packaged food has its own nutrition label today, I hope that every product has its own LCA and EPD one day.”
7. Angelica Ciranni, 29
Assistant Vice President, Sustainability Analyst, PNC Financial Services; Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh has transformed from a tired steel mill town to a center of the green building movement, and two LEED Platinum buildings symbolize that change: the David L. Lawrence Convention Center and the Tower at PNC Plaza.
Angelica Ciranni has been the public voice that educates the city on the significance of these buildings. She also keeps operations of the Tower at PNC Plaza in LEED compliance, overseeing the green building program within PNC’s Energy Management and Sustainability team.
“We see it as the crown jewel of our PNC LEED efforts,” Ciranni says of the tower, and she strives to keep it that way. “We build these fantastic buildings but then it takes a whole lot of work to get them to work in the ways we intended.”
What does that work involve? A supervisor describes what Ciranni puts into the effort: “She is a jack of all trades who will get her hands dirty conducting a waste audit, will meticulously comb through spreadsheets of greenhouse data, will motivate dubious colleagues to change behavior, and will fluently present our vision to senior management.”
Ciranni keeps pushing PNC buildings to operate at the top of their sustainability game, driving for ever-greater energy efficiency and water savings.
8. James Connelly, 29
Director, Living Product Challenge, International Living Future Institute; Seattle, Washington
When James Connelly was studying architecture at the University of Washington, he dreamed up what an ultra-green living building might look like. As it turns out, he now works in that building: downtown Seattle’s Bullitt Center, dubbed the greenest in the world. It includes design elements from his thesis.
“It’s pretty cool,” he said of the headquarters of his now-employer, the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). “A lot of the concepts that we worked in in our design concept actually made it into the project.”
Though Connelly cut his teeth in buildings, via a Fulbright Scholarship focused on green building rating systems in China, he also learned the ins and outs of supply chains while working at Boeing. At ILFI, he has combined those knowledge bases and honed a focus on transparency.
First, he helped create Declare, a first-of-its-kind ingredient label for building materials. Now, Connelly has broadened his focus with the Living Product Challenge, consulting with both large and small companies to reimagine the way their products are designed, built and sold.
The elusive question that keeps him going: “Could the creation of every single product that a company makes provide a benefit for society?”
9. Christina Copeland, 27
Manager, Disclosure Services, CDP; New York City
Over the four years since she joined CDP’s North American operation, Christina Copeland has become one of the organization’s foremost speakers on water security and stewardship — often addressing investor groups and environmental forums hosted by such organizations as the Inter-American Development Bank.
Her interest stems from personal experience during a year-long assignment as a consultant with services firm Tata in Mumbai, India. “I felt sheltered from water issues in my apartment, where I had a water filter attached to my sink,” Copeland recalled. “Until about three months in, when my hair started falling out because I didn’t have a filter on my showerhead.”
Technically, her job description is broader — helping U.S. and Canadian companies prepare climate, water and forestry disclosure statements. But Copeland believes the water crisis in emerging economies is “a necessary action underpinning the solution of so many other issues such as disease, poverty and the transition to a low-carbon economy.”
Copeland grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, near the Appalachian Trail. She relishes the memory of morning crew boat sessions on the Connecticut River. Her future career emerged at Cornell University, where she interned for the school’s Department of Energy & Sustainability. She’s been paddling hard ever since.
10. Lisa Curtis, 28
Founder and CEO, Kuli Kuli Foods; Oakland, California
Does the world really need another energy bar? If it can help to “create a world where malnutrition only exists in history textbooks,” then serve it up. That’s the goal of startup Kuli Kuli, named for a peanut snack in Niger, where Lisa Curtis served in the Peace Corps.
The bars and drinks are the only ones to use the leaves of the nutritious moringa “miracle tree,” and they’re already sold in Whole Foods stores. Curtis sources moringa from women-owned cooperatives in Ghana, and has partnered with the Clinton Foundation to plant the trees in Haiti.
Sustainability is part of Kuli Kuli’s DNA. The Bay Area native said she aims to prove that “a mission-driven company can plant trees, empower women and still earn a profit.” She says her productivity ramped up when she started jotting down positive thoughts instead of crossing off the each day on a calendar.
What superpower does this superfood advocate dream of having? Teleportation to replace air travel — especially because she often needs to be in multiple places at once. The Whitman College graduate and former White House intern cut her teeth directing communications at solar financing startup Mosaic.
11. Miguel CuUnjieng, 28
Corporate Program Manager, Ceres; Boston
When Miguel CuUnjieng got a job out of college with the Philippines’ largest shopping mall development firm, SM Prime Holdings, he was grateful but suggested a different role: launching a sustainability program. The CEO gave him three months to prove the value of sustainability in real estate and shopping mall development.
“It was truly a wild ride,” CuUnjieng recalls. “I began managing the company-wide sustainability efforts,” including developing sustainability goals and metrics and a reporting plan. He won. SM Prime adopted sustainability into operations, which it continues to this day.
CuUnjieng went on Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, then to the Coca-Cola Foundation, where he developed a geo-mapping digital communications strategy to build awareness about the foundation’s work and a social media strategy.
Now he engages with Ceres’ banking and financial sector members. “One such project involved evaluating carbon risk exposure in a client’s electric power portfolio,” which led the client to revise its global coal mining and coal-fired power investments, he said.
As to long-term goals: “I want to help establish the business case for sustainability as an unassailable position.”
12. John DeAngelis, 26
Energy Program Manager, Steelcase; Grand Rapids, Michigan
John DeAngelis grew up with an entrepreneurial bent in Fairfield, Iowa. Selling gelato in high school with his brothers enabled him to buy a car.
“Everybody wants to make money,” he said. “That’s a great part of business. I wanted something more from business, and I wasn’t sure what that was.” So he pursued a unique program in sustainable business at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, where he was originally torn between business administration, public policy and engineering. “It kind of clicked that there was a way to do business that enhanced profits and the bottom line, but also deeply benefited local communities and the environment.”
Compared to most corporations, furniture maker Steelcase has a sweeping sustainability infrastructure. DeAngelis, who started as an intern in procurement, said he’s surprised to lead high-impact projects so early in his career, including overseeing the company’s renewable energy portfolio and engaging deeply with energy policy in Michigan.
Steelcase is a member of the RE100 coalition, counts more than 200 million Kilowatt-hours in its portfolio, and executed its first wind power buy in February without a broker. DeAngelis, who plays golf in his spare moments, said setting the ball rolling with quick wins is key to keeping huge commitments on track.
13. Joel Espino, 28
Environmental Equity Legal Counsel, Greenlining Institute; Berkeley, California
Sustainability wasn’t always Joel Espino’s be-all, end-all career goal. Rather, the clean transportation-focused attorney with the California-based Greenlining Institute was inspired to help bridge environmental action with social equity after growing up the son of Mexican immigrants.
“Like most immigrant stories, things like poverty, discrimination, hard work and exploitation were constant themes for me growing up,” Espino said. “This story is not unique. And that’s what motivated me to do something about it.”
His first career path was on racial justice-oriented public policy. But he credits a fellowship with his current employer for driving home an understanding of disproportionate environmental impacts. His focus now is ensuring that low-income communities and communities of color aren’t left out of the shift to electric vehicles, working to ensure inclusion of equity requirements in state- and utility-driven EV charging pilots.
Ultimately, Espino hopes to see 1 million EVs on the road in California by 2023, with access reaching broadly across demographics, embracing the increasing diversity of the state’s population, rather than shying away from it.
As for why the University of California Hastings College alum has chosen the legal route to effect that change?
“Legal rules have always been used to change or influence people’s behavior,” he said. “The thinking is that if you have a legal rule in place long enough, the resulting behavior change becomes the norm and changes collective values.”
14. Natasha Franck, 28
CEO and Founder, Etology; New York City
Natasha Franck was spending a lot of time in Beijing and Hong Kong as a Senior VP with the real estate consultancy Delos, working to blaze a trail for WELL-certified, healthy cities. Yet breathing foul air, “exper
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