Trash to Roads the beginning
How did I get here? It started with the key focuses of my human spirit,
Curiosity: The drive to ask questions and explore new ideas, even in unexpected places. When I see litter and trash, I see it from all different angles. Angles like, why do we call this trash? What are these items made of? Is it trash or does it just not have a system in place to revalue it?
Innovation: The ability to find creative, disruptive solutions to traditional challenges. Searching for the outliers in industries and seeing where they succeeded and why certain approaches failed. To transform the concept of waste into a resource, finding ways to integrate it into infrastructure like road paving. It takes asking the same question from different angles. It takes a multi-spectral approach and not just seeing a problem through my eyes but through many angles, reverse engineering the question.
Resiliency: The capacity to withstand challenges and setbacks while continuing to move forward. Resiliency enables me to navigate doubts, technical hurdles, and resistance to change, staying focused on the bigger picture of long-term solutions. This area for me relies heavily on the people I keep around me. The team and colleagues around me must be solution oriented, and have these value sets as well.
Sustainability: A commitment to creating systems that preserve resources and balance environmental needs. Is my idea of solution simply creating a new problem somewhere else? Is this a holistic solution that can grow more, employ more, and help more than just the issue I initially started with? Sustainability guided my pursuit of using recycled materials to develop roads, aiming for infrastructure that reduces waste and enhances environmental stewardship.
Collectively, these values allowed me to shift my perspective on trash, transforming it from a problem into an opportunity. My curiosity sparked the idea, innovation shaped the solution, resiliency kept me on track, and sustainability ensured that my solution would have lasting benefits. This combination enabled me to pioneer a circular solution for road paving that reduces waste and strengthens infrastructure.
Want this in your city? Do you have a solution that needs to scale? I specialize in pilot program activation and would love to help!
xoxo