Dr. Julie Sinistore, Project Director, Sustainability, Energy and Climate Change, WSP USA
Editor’s note: Dr. Sinistore will be moderating several panels at next week’s American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA) conference in Fort Collins, CO. For more information or to register, please click here: https://www.conftool.net/lca-xviii/sessions.php
WSP USA is a global engineering firm with over 40,000 associates worldwide. WSP is perhaps best known for its work related to building and infrastructure design. Recent projects include Salesforce Tower and Transit Center in San Francisco, the London Tube station, and California High-Speed Rail. Dr. Sinistore works in the Water & Environment business sector as part of the Sustainability, Energy and Climate Change group. The group focuses on both corporate and product sustainability. The corporate sustainability team assists clients with many aspects of sustainability strategy from managing greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories and setting science-based targets for GHG emissions to product sustainability and life cycle assessment (LCA). The multidisciplinary team helps clients navigate a complex sustainability and energy landscape and unlock opportunities to reduce cost, create brand value and mitigate risk across the value chain, ultimately building more resilient organizations that can thrive in a changing global market. The product sustainability part of the group provides a variety of services including LCAs, product carbon and water footprints, and innovating design for products ranging from bio-based fuels and chemicals to electronics, consumer goods, construction materials, and services such as the administration of financial products.
In addition to her consulting services, Dr. Sinistore offers LCA training through WSP and teaches courses at the University of California-Berkeley on life cycle thinking and sustainable product design.
What do you actually do all day?
I spend most of my day interacting with clients, doing life cycle assessments (LCAs), providing comments, feedback, and insights on strategy projects and going to meetings. An LCA begins with meeting with the client to discuss their goals and develop the scope of the project. We find out what questions the client is trying to answer with the LCA and ensuring that the project is scoped in such a way that we can answer those questions.
Next, we collect a lot of data. For example, with an electronics product, you need to know what their global supply chain is like, where the inputs are being produced, where the final product is being manufactured, how it is shipped, how it is used, does it need energy to be used, what energy grid is it drawing from, what consumables does it use over its lifetime (like electricity), and how is it disposed of at the end of its useful life.
Disassembling a computer for assessment
We use modeling software to calculate the results which include things like total GHG emissions for the product, total water consumption, total waste generated, what waste goes to landfill, what waste is incinerated, and impacts to water quality (not just how much water is used, but how much water is made unusable for other applications such as when industrial processes make water brackish or full of chemicals).
We often suggest that the client has an LCA report put through a critical review by a panel of three independent experts. A lot of my time is spent guiding the report through the review process. It’s similar to defending a dissertation or a master’s thesis. You’ve got people who are experts in the field with a lot to say about it, they have lots of comments, questions, and criticisms about the report and will decide if the report was conducted in accordance with the relevant standards.
The last part of an LCA project involves finding ways to help our clients communicate what can be complex science-y stuff to non-science audiences. We spend a lot of time ensuring our clients understand what the results mean, how they can use them to steer design or how to use them in messaging and external communication. Many of our clients conduct an LCA because they want to make a claim in the marketplace such as “our product has lower GHG emissions than the competitive product” or “we’ve reduced the amount of energy required to make our product by 50%”.
Life cycle assessments are governed by ISO standards 14040 and 14044, so we primarily use those in our work, but there are others that govern carbon footprinting (ISO 14047), water footprinting (ISO 14046), and communication around carbon footprints. There are also standards that govern environmental product declarations (EPDs) such as EN15804 and ISO 14025.
In addition to my work with WSP, I also serve on the US Technical Advisory Group to ISO for the Environmental Management Group 207. Since ISO (roughly translated as the International Standards Organization) is an international body, there are technical advisory groups from each country that submit comments on updates to existing standards to ISO and propose new standards, and I serve on the group representing the US.
With Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (Center)
I’m also on the board of the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA). We don’t make or set the standards, but we also have a representative to ISO and we actively discuss standards under development and new rules or language changes and other regulations and standards relevant to LCA. ACLCA organizes an amazing annual conference where practitioners come to meet and talk about the latest and greatest in the world of LCA, research, and what companies are doing. I’m really looking forward to the upcoming conference where I’ll be speaking on a lot of great topics like applications of LCA in CDP and sustainability applications of Blockchain.
One of the big projects I’m working on at the moment is helping companies to quantify the water embedded in the power that they use, their scope 2 water. In a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory, scope 2 emissions come from generating the power that a company uses. What we’re finding is that some organizations we work with are already quantifying their scope 1 water (the water they use directly in their operations) and want to quantify scope 2 as well. There really wasn’t a lot of data about how to conduct a scope 2 inventory that didn’t also include scope 3 use (water used in fuel extraction or the production of solar panels) so we’re partnering with the World Resources Institute (WRI) to develop a guidance document and a set of factors for organizations that want to quantify scope 2 water withdrawals and consumption. We hope that will be available by the end of the year. I will be talking about it at the September ACLCA conference.
Our goal for our work in water is to help organizations understand where the hotspots are and how their operations, supply chains, and materials selections are affecting water worldwide – not just how much water they are using, but how much is being made unusable (consumption). We also want our clients to know if they are using water in a location that is experiencing scarcity from drought, heavy demand from industrial centers, or both. Once that’s been identified, we can help them find different ways of doing things. For example, scope 2 water is an important driver if you have a data center to cool. You need to decide if you want to cool it with a water-cooling system or an air-cooling system. To reduce on-site water consumption, an organization might choose an air-cooled system, but if the data center is located in an area that uses a lot of water to generate the electricity the air-cooling might not reduce water consumption. This is a major consideration for operations located in water-scare areas.
What are some of the key skills for success in this role?
Communication, communication, communication. You can do all the amazing science you want, but if no one finds out what you’re doing and you can’t explain it to other people, then it may as well have not happened. Analytical skills and a strong engineering background are definitely required for this role as well.
You also need the ability to think of creative ways to structure the way you conduct an analysis to help answer the question. This avoids spending time collecting data or analyzing things that do not fundamentally answer the question that the commissioner of the study wants answered. Sometimes a review panel will ask “why didn’t you research xyz” and you have to say that investigating that particular angle wouldn’t help answer the client’s question which is why it’s not included in the study. It’s very different from an academic research paper where you have to apply a more all-encompassing approach. When publishing a journal article, if a reviewer asks you to include xyz, you have to include it whether it was part of the original intent of the study or not. You can try to make an argument as to why it’s not included, but you can’t interact directly with the reviewer to really explain why it’s not pertinent to answering the research question, so if they say it has to be included or the article won’t be published, you have to do this extra work. Sometimes great articles don’t get published over disagreements like this.
What is your favorite part of your job?
The wide variety of types of companies I get to work with and the very broad array of products and services that I get to evaluate. I also think it’s really cool when I’ve done some sort of assessment and I see it manifest in the world around me – I see the product or I see the announcement that funding has been dedicated for a project, and it feels great to have had a role in that thing happening.
What is the hardest part of your job?
It’s lots of paperwork and dealing with people who can sometimes request work that is out of the original scope of the project and then negotiating how to meet everyone’s needs without going over budget. That’s tough.
What is your proudest professional achievement?
That’s a tough question to answer since confidentiality prevents me from discussing a lot of specific work projects. I can tell you that every example I’m proudest of comes from a time when the work I’ve done has directly resulted in an actual change happening in the world. It’s a really good feeling when an analysis I’ve conducted has caused a major company to make big changes in favor of sustainability. Making change on a global scale is the whole reason I left academia to get into this space.
What are the game changers in your world?
I wish that there was more value placed on sustainability. Often it feels like sustainability is seen as a ‘nice to have’ and not a ‘need to have’ at many companies. I wish that there was more consumer demand for sustainability and more scrutiny of sustainability claims. The trend of concern for the environment is growing every day and with every generation, but I do wish people examined the “green claims” of products and services a little more and asked more questions. Just because a product is bio-based does not mean it is necessarily “better” for the environment. If people asked more questions about claims and had more background in fundamental science, then we would have a more informed consumer audience that would motivate companies to see the value in backing their claims with science. I definitely see greenwashing out there, and sometimes my students will ask me “is this product better than that one?” and I respond with “Well, what does ‘better’ even mean? Less water? Lower GHG emissions? More trees?” My job is to teach people to think more critically and not accept claims at face value. Generally, if people were more in-tune with sustainability and its inherent value there would be greater motivation for all companies to source sustainability, make their operations more sustainable and validate sustainability claims.
What was your path to this role?
Every job I’ve ever had has had something to do with the environment, agriculture, or sustainability. I first became interested in sustainability when I was ten. I read a lot of magazines about environmental issues and causes – endangered species, the rainforest, the ozone layer. Then I watched the movie Medicine Man, and I became sincerely concerned with saving the rainforest as a ten-year-old!
Installing rooftop solar panels with the non-profit Grid Alternatives
I decided to go vegetarian when I was 14 and read Diet for a Small Planet and found out about the impact of animal agriculture on the rainforest and animals. That helped me become a strong animal and sustainability advocate which spurred my participation in environmental awareness and human rights groups in high school. These were formative learning experiences about what was happening to the environment and people around the world and how to get organized and fund raise. When I got to college, I decided that if I wouldn’t eat an animal, then why would I eat anything that came out of it and went vegan.
My undergraduate degree was in Natural Resource Management with a minor in Environmental Policies, Institutions and Behaviors. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on reducing our paper usage on campus and convincing Rutgers to switch to at least 30% post-consumer recycled paper for all administrative documents. A lot of my course work was focused on organic and conventional agriculture. I worked on the Rutgers vegetable research farm, the Rutgers gardens and the Cook College Student Organic farm which was a three acre Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. After college, I moved to the Adirondack mountains and was the assistant hut master for a remote retreat called John’s Brook Lodge (owned by the Adirondack Mountain Club). It had solar panels and no cell phone reception or internet. We hiked in perishable food to feed 26 guests each day, plus staff (non-perishables were stocked in the pantry) and we hiked out our trash. It was amazing!
Hiking to John’s Brook Lodge
After that, I managed an organic CSA farm in Westchester, NY. We grew fruits and vegetables on 1.5 acres of land about 60 families in the CSA and we had a flock of chickens that I inherited from the previous land-manager. I learned that farming was back-breaking labor and that it barely paid the bills, so I looked for something different that would rely more on my mind than my physical labor.
Holding Rocket the Chicken
I took a job with AmeriCorps that brought me to the San Joaquin Valley of California writing water and sewer infrastructure grants for low-income farmer-worker communities. There were some communities that had contaminated drinking-water or raw sewage backing up into the streets from under-sized pipes. I did that for a year and it was heartbreaking. There was so much need and simply not enough money to help everyone – there were some communities that would apply year after year and still didn’t get the funds they needed.
That helped me realize that I needed to go back to graduate school to learn more. As a young woman with a science background I usually wasn’t taken seriously. People often assumed I was there to take notes and make coffee (true story – a guy called me hun and asked me to take dictation at a meeting I organized). I wanted to make sure this never happened again and I thought the fastest path was to get an advanced degree, so I applied to several programs and was accepted to the Masters of Science in Agroecology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This is where I was first introduced to LCA through a funded project that became my master’s thesis on corn grain ethanol. I loved that LCA applied the scientific-method to evaluate environmental impacts throughout the life cycle of a product. I completed the program in 3 semesters and became the first graduate from the agroecology program even though I started a semester after the first cohort! Shortly before I graduated, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) was awarded to UW-Madison which meant that there were a lot of opportunities to continue researching biofuels. One of my thesis advisors applied for a five-year fully-funded PhD student to work on the LCA of cellulosic ethanol and asked me to apply. The only hitch was that his home department was biological systems engineering, and I had no engineering background. He assured me that I could be accepted to the program and I would only have to take “a few deficiency courses.” I did get into the program, but a few deficiency courses ended up being and extra ten undergraduate engineering classes with students 10 years younger than me. I took these classes while I did my graduate course work, and did my dissertation research on the LCA of cellulosic ethanol for the GLBRC and ended up with a PhD in Engineering!
In my graduate research, I got to pick the LCA software I would use and received training on it. I chose GaBi® and became an adept user. Right after graduate school, I had a job as a Senior LCA analyst for a bio-based fuels and chemicals company where I continued to use GaBi®. When I decided to make a job-change from there, I contacted the person who taught me the software to see if the company was hiring and they were! The catch was that they needed someone who could do LCA on electronics, but I didn’t know anything about electronics. Still, I said I had done more complicated LCAs and I’m sure I could learn on the job about electronics. Agriculture is more complicated because you put stuff on the soil and you don’t know where all of it goes! At least with electronics, what goes in comes out! I submitted a resume and was flown out to have in-person interviews and give a sample presentation, but then I was hired! It helped that they had known me for a few years and knew I had been trained by their LCA trainers.
After a few years there, I was ready for the next challenge with WSP. This came through a connection with the person I replaced doing electronics LCA. WSP reached out to him to see if he was still interested in the topic, but he had moved on to go get a PhD, so he put them in contact with me. Again, I flew out for in-person interviews, and presented a business plan. This was not as strong of an existing relationship as my previous job, but I got the job! At WSP, I lead the LCA practice applying LCA to not just biofuels and electronics, but also consumer goods, construction products, and electronic services. Plus, I get to work on other types of projects like CDP and GHG emissions inventories. I’ve found out about most of my jobs through a networking connection and then demonstrated my skills to get the job. If you have a technical skill that’s needed, networking in circles where those skills are needed is the best way I have found to find new roles.
What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?
A lot of people ask me how I developed my career. I’m not a great example of career strategy since it’s all been so serendipitous. I’d just say follow the world – if the world gives you an opportunity that you don’t have a background in (like electronics, engineering, or business development for me) take it. Even if you’ve never taken a class in it, you can figure it out. Don’t be scared. Say yes! Trust that you’re a smart person and learn what you need on the job. Take every opportunity to talk to people who do what you want to do and learn how they did it. Take opportunities to speak publicly and to give presentations, be interviewed on the radio as expert, and other opportunities as they arise. In unconventional fields you don’t get jobs in conventional ways.
What are your favorite resources?
The American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA) has an awesome conference focused on sustainability, energy, materials and design.
The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center has some great LCA resources for the classroom.
There’s a vegan podcast called Our Hen House that I love. I was interviewed on episode 411.
Colleen Patrick Goudreau has a wonderful vegan podcast called Food for Thought.
I love the books Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken and Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by Michael Braungart and William McDonough.
Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?
I really respect Frances Moore Lappé for what she’s done over the last 40 years with Diet for a Small Planet and her many other books. I got to meet her when she was speaking at a Wisconsin renewable energy fair, she even signed my old second hand 1975 edition of her book. I told her about how it inspired me to go vegetarian then vegan and to study sustainability and LCA and she said that it was really heart-warming to hear that she inspired people to do meaningful things in the world. I hope to do that with what I do every day.
With Frances Moore Lappé
