Rows of olive trees cradle the foothills of the Chilean Andean Mountains, forming a blanket of green. For a country contending with water shortages from both industrialization processes and drought, keeping the trees flourishing comes at a price.
Chatting with farmers in the fields and with employees in the production plants where olives are pressed and bottled, Terry Yosie (DC’81) is helping Chilean olive oil producers address environmental problems. As the president and CEO of the World Environment Center (WEC), an independent non-profit, non-advocacy organization that works with businesses the world over to develop sustainable solutions, Yosie asks a gamut of questions: How can producers use water and energy more efficiently? How can wastewater and carbon emissions be reduced?
After helping nine different companies run a baseline assessment, they find a major issue: Companies aren’t accurately controlling and measuring the use of resources, like water.
The WEC helps devise a plan to better control the flow of water and to install more efficient valves that let managers monitor water usage. They also replace fuel boilers used to incinerate olive pits with biomass boilers that use organic fuel sources.
Yosie and the WEC then connect Chile’s olive oil businesses to local non-profit organizations, consultants, and educators, who train managers and workers in sustainable practices. In three years, the industry saves more than 2 million gallons of water; spares 400,000 kWh of energy; and eliminates 200 tons of CO2 from admittance into the atmosphere, equal to emissions from about 26,000 gallons of gasoline.
What’s more, the results lead the Chilean government and the olive oil industry to sign a clean-production agreement in 2013 that ensures the practices carry on into the future.
Since taking the WEC’s executive role in 2006, Yosie has continued to prove to the world that business objectives and environmental responsibility aren’t mutually exclusive. Traveling to fields and factories and taking an “on-the-ground” perspective, he gets positive results from projects he implements in the textile, food, hotel, retail, and energy-production industries throughout Central and South America, North Africa, and China.
At the same time, the WEC is doing its part to help global companies, such as IBM, Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Unilever, lead the way in sustainable development. By hosting “roundtable discussions,” the WEC brings senior business executives and their suppliers together with researchers and policy-makers. After discussing strategies, technologies, best practices, and case studies, companies turn out better, more ecofriendly products; implement emergent, cost-saving sustainable technologies; and have a better understanding of sustainable challenges along the supply chain.
“These kinds of discussions have helped IBM, for example, “gain headlights into the future,” helping them to modify their products and solutions for sustainability, says IBM’s Vice President of Corporate Environmental Affairs and Product Safety, Wayne Balta (E’82). Take the challenges involving cities, water, and food. IBM has been developing solutions, which integrate Big Data and analytics for smarter cities. For good reason: by 2015 it’s estimated there will be over 20 global megacities with populations exceeding 10 million people.”
In the case of Shanghai General Motors Chinese operation, WEC has helped the company save more than 1 million tons of water among participating suppliers and eliminate more than 55,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2009.
Yosie says he’s never forgotten why he takes environmental responsibility so seriously. Growing up during the 1960s in a small coal-mining town about 70 miles east of Pittsburgh, coal was a way of life. It was the main source of income for his family—his father and grandfathers were miners—and everything was heated by coal. One of Yosie’s chores was to clean ashes out of the coal stove every week, and he recalls that despite his mother’s best efforts, coal dust seemed to permeate every nook and cranny. The town was often engulfed in a smoky haze and the local streams ran yellow with acid-mine drainage.
His parents wanted a different life for him, especially after his father developed black lung disease. He would be the first in his family to obtain an advanced degree. After he earned his BA and MA in history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, one of his professors told him about a PhD opportunity at Carnegie Mellon, a chance to work on a National Science Foundation-funded research project of his former classmate, Joel Tarr, professor of history and policy.
Yosie seized the opportunity. Instead of studying kings and queens of days of old, he focused on the historical development of Pittsburgh and its environmental impact. When it came time for his dissertation, he wasn’t content to stay within the history department. He followed Tarr’s lead and reached out to faculty and researchers in the engineering and business schools.
Francis Clay McMichael, a CMU civil engineering professor who was a scientific advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency, was so impressed with the hardworking PhD student that he recommended him to the EPA. Yosie became the executive director of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, where Tarr says he amped up the operation by bringing in top researchers and scientists.
According to Yosie, it was his multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving and an innate ability to network with many different people, fostered by CMU and his “revered lifelong mentor,” Joel Tarr, which propelled his career forward.
Now, years later, at the helm of the WEC, he applies that same multidisciplinary approach to address the pressing issues of today and tomorrow, whether that’s working with a small Chilean industry or helping the Chinese government implement its five-year plan.
“One of the world’s biggest challenges today is that the big problems—population growth, poverty, water supply, climate change—are interconnected,” says Yosie. “You must have a bolder, more ambitious vision if you want to change the world these days.”
For his ambitions and achievement in sustainability, he was awarded CMU’s 2013 Alumni Achievement Award.
