Neil Drobny - How a Patent in the Antarctic led to a Career in Sustainability

[00:00:00] Dominique: Hello welcome to our episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Adam: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Dominique, the sustainability expert.

[00:00:20] Dominique: I am so glad to be here alongside Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job or community, and have done something pretty cool about it.

[00:00:30] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists. This podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. 

[00:00:37] Dominique: Today, Adam and I are joined by Dr. Neil Drobny. He's the program director of the Bronco Challenge for Sustainable Impact at Western Michigan University, which is located in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

This is the challenge to task students to solve the world's most difficult problems identified by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Neil has also had a previous professional career as an independent business consultant. And had a critical hand in building what is today the Ohio State University's sustainability major which we'll talk more about in our next episode.

I'm very grateful that Neil was also a key mentor in my own startup journey, and today we're chatting with Neil to dive into his success in building a career for himself around sustainability and building a program to launch students into sustainability and their own focused careers. 

Thanks for joining us, Neil, Well, my first question for you is that's, I think you've done quite a bit in terms of like getting into like the application of sustainability to business, to academia, but what sparked your interest in the environmental space in your personal journey?

[00:01:36] Neil: Well, this goes back before there was a word for sustainability when I was in Boy Scouts and we had leaders who always talked to us about the need to clean up the campsite better than you left it, et cetera, et cetera. And that somehow stuck with me. 

And when I went to college, I talked about my interest in waste management, et cetera, and professors looked at me like, "What kind of, what planet are you from? Uh, that's not a problem. We have plenty of place to dump our trash, and you can't make any money worrying about those kind of things." You are a study space or computer technology, which were big at the time, which was in the late fifties. So I, I did not, take to heart their advice. And so I majored in Civil Engineering with an environmental specialization which was the option that was available. 

I was in the Navy, ROTC and got my commission, but wanted to do a master's degree, which would've meant I would've spent an extra two years on campus.

I went to Dartmouth College and needed to get permission from the Navy not to take my commission and go on active duty, and they helped me arrange that, it was not a big deal. And then I had to pick a problem for a dissertation, and my faculty advisor knew some things about Alaska and how sanitation problems in Alaska were a problem. And so I was never able to go up there. But he said, you know, the leader in all these Alaskan villages is the school master and you can get in touch with them. And so I had correspondence with probably a dozen or two school masters about waste issues in Alaska.

And a lot of the technical literature I was able to read was published by the Navy from a laboratory in California where they were the logistics support contractor for Operation Deep Freeze in the Antarctic. And there were some environmental issues associated with operating down there.

When it got time to go on active duty, I didn't know any better. I just wrote a letter to the Chief of Naval Operation. Because I have this great background in cold weather sanitation, you ought to assign me to this laboratory in California to spend my two years working on research and letter comes back.

"Great idea. Thanks for the suggestion." 

Nobody could believe it. So I got orders after I finished my master's degree to report to duty at this laboratory in California. Didn't know anything about it. And it was about 300 people and there were two military people, a commanding officer and executive officer, and me, the first ensen(?) In the Navy to show up there for duty.

And so they said, "Well, you're obvious." They talked to me a little bit and they said, "Well, you're not career oriented, so we're gonna put you into the research group that we have." They had a polar division and they were happy to have me 'cause I was free labor. 

And they said, you know, the biggest, one of the biggest problems we have down there are these toilet systems. They're basically, uh airplane toilets, you know, a lot of electromechanical parts and the supply chain. It was about a year if a part needed to be replaced 'cause it's 25,000 miles away. In the Antarctic and they say, if you could come up with something really, really simple that would be an improvement.

So I worked for two years and came up with something very, very simple. They liked it, we field tested it not down there, but in some construction sites in California. My boss at the time, he said, you know, I don't know if we'll ever use this or not, but it's so novel that I think we can get a patent on it. So they applied for a patent in my name and I got it. It's the only patent I have in my life.

But I got out of the Navy with a, uh, with a patent for a toilet and. 

So that then led me to looking for a job in networking around at conferences and so forth while in the Navy, I had met one of the leaders at Battelle who was interested in environmental things. And so he arranged for me to get a job interview at Battelle. And I think when I walked in the door at age 25 with a patent, they said, this guy must be a patent machine. And I they hired me

[00:05:40] Dominique: Like think of what he could do with us if he did this to the toilet.

[00:05:42] Neil: Yeah. Yeah. So I spent probably what, 15 great years at Battelle, learning all the things about how you go about doing business and making sales to people to sponsor environmental projects.

[00:05:54] Adam: What did those projects look like at Battelle?

[00:05:57] Neil: They were a variety of things. The first one they gave me, they had just won a contract with the at that time was a predecessor of the EPA, was the Public Health Service had responsibility and they wanted a technical handbook on technology available for solid waste utilization.

So it was right up my alley and I did the research and published a document. And the public health service liked it so much, they made a public document out of it. It's now registered someplace in the archives of the government printing office reports. 

[00:06:28] Adam: Very important place for...

[00:06:30] Neil: That was really my first job. I was the project manager and the primary investigator.

[00:06:36] Adam: So for listeners that aren't from Columbus, can you share what Batelle is?

[00:06:39] Neil: Yeah, Batelle is a worldwide research organization founded in Columbus in the thirties. It's now almost a hundred years old. They operate all of the Department of Energy research laboratories around the country. They're into just about every field of science and engineering. 

[00:06:57] Dominique: But why not just be a researcher? Why not be a business person? At a time when people weren't on board, what made you wanna connect, you know, to be caring about waste management or caring about some of these things? 

[00:07:08] Neil: Well, the, the caring about the environment came from the, the Boy Scout experience, but both my mother and father had been retail entrepreneurs. So I had some, business and entrepreneurial skills. Then I got to, to college and beyond and learned that there was a business dimension to environmental issues. And so that combination has been something that I've stuck with. 

[00:07:32] Dominique: I feel like you've been around for a lot of conversations that are not the most receptive to sustainability at the beginning, and maybe you've seen like a pivot around the topic of sustainability in business and the benefits. What do you usually find to be successful points to bring up? 

[00:07:50] Neil: Well, it's, it's just good for business if you can have a long enough conversation. One quip I use, "So, oh, you don't wanna be a sustainable company? You'd like to be an unsustainable company?"

"Well, not really." 

"Well, what do you mean not really?" 

And you can then let lead that out so you, you'd really not like to discharge all this dirty water that's from your process or from your air pollution, et cetera. So I think people know that this is a, a moral thing to do, but also an economic and good business thing to do.

[00:08:23] Dominique: Well, you've also seen what is now Gen Z. In comparison to and the way they receive sustainability 

and you've seen big executives you like give us a tangible comparison in what you think is shifting? I mean, the easy answer is Gen Z knows they're gonna feel the impacts, but like, do you have any other, just insight on someone who's been in the industry and talked about sustainability for so long?

[00:08:46] Neil: Some of the examples that, you know, from days past, I knew one company where the environmental manager wanted the company to invest in certain way to handle hazardous waste and the CEO said, "Well, that's fine with me if you wanna do it, but any, any money you spend is coming outta your bonus."

I mean, that was sort of the bottom of the ground floor of, of, of attitude. One of the turning points was in the early nineties when companies started issuing environmental reports, not just commenting on environmental issues in their annual report, but they had environmental reports. Now they've got sustainability reports, and the early days they were 15 glossy pages and you know, only addressing the positive stuff.

And now there's too voluminous to put on paper. So they're online and titles have been changed to corporate social responsibility reports, ESG reports. But there's a recognition among and most companies that they have to be public with what they're doing and what they're not doing if they want to attract customers and employees.

It may have a short term economic look to it, but investors are of course, long term focused and they're one of the, the groups that are really pushing a lot of companies. 

[00:10:07] Adam: That's a really interesting point that investors are, are taking a much more long-term view. And they understand the impact of sustainability over the long term. When did that really start to change?

[00:10:17] Neil: Oh, let's pick a number. 10 years, maybe a little more. You know, some companies, well, like interface carpets. The founder was, Ray Anderson and he talks about how in the mid nineties he had this epiphany, he read a book that pointed out to him he was plundering the earth and he needed to set his company on a new path. So he framed his initiative as a journey up Mount Sustainability. 

[00:10:43] Dominique: I like that visual.

[00:10:44] Neil: And what he did not do is appoint somebody as the Chief Sustainability person to go around and get the plants straightened out. He went around himself and said, "This is my company. I founded it. My baby. I'm gonna fix it and you're gonna help me. If you wanna work for me." 

[00:11:02] Dominique: and I mean that's probably was so powerful to imagine the change he was creating 'cause if you're CEO and owner are telling you to make a change. There's no discussion to be had.

[00:11:09] Neil: That's exactly right. Yeah.

[00:11:11] Dominique: Which there is a lot of time wasted or at least spent with the discussions

[00:11:15] Neil: He has a nice clip in one of his films where he was down in Atlanta, that was their headquarters and he had a little bit of southern accent, so that helps his storytelling. But our company came to visit with him. They had heard about his initiatives and One of the leaders of that visiting team was not very cooperative in the discussion and excused themselves at lunchtime or something to go to the restroom, came back and had a totally different attitude. 

He did some research, asked some questions, you know, what changed your mind? And the person said, "Well, on the way to the restroom, I met this guy operating a forklift. And we had a very short conversation. And he cut the conversation short and said, "Excuse me, I'm gonna have to get this roll of carpet out to the dock, or our air emissions are just gonna go through the roof." 

And the impression that it made was that the employees right down to the level of a forklift truck operator had gotten the message and were carrying it out like they needed to.

[00:12:12] Dominique: One thing I wanted to bring up was that you did have a big part of your career in consulting, working with businesses like that, and I wanna hear how you got into that, 

[00:12:22] Neil: The consulting was with a company, ERM. It's probably now like it is now, the world's largest pure play consulting firm. I joined them in the 80s right after they got started and they had a few dozen employees, that had come out of a larger company. And the reason they got a small company started is 'cause they didn't wanna work in a big company. Never did they dream that their own company would become 5,000 people someday. 

They had a very regional approach and they were looking to get a business started in the Midwest. And so I started ERM, Midwest office and ran that for 15 or 20 years or whatever it was, but the growth that they've achieved, it was a great leader, is just phenomenal. 

[00:13:03] Adam: Were sustainability issues different when you were working for them?

[00:13:07] Neil: Yes, it was in the hazardous waste days and the driving legislation was the Resource Conservation Recovery Act and Superfund, the cleanup of sites. So that was most of our work. But then they finally got those things cleaned up and the realization was, we can't keep making Superfund sites.

And that led to, well, we have to look at our supply chain. We have to look at our customers. Oh, we gotta look at our, what our employees are doing. And that just grew into sustainability and the word sustainability came about, and maybe, you know, there was a book published in 1985, Our Common Future, and that coined the phrase of Sustainable Development from which sustainability evolved.

And there was a time when some people thought sustainability was a little too woke and so they just used environmental. And now some people even talk about environmental sustainability. I wonder what about the other pieces of it? 'Cause it has a large social component. Those are the two main components, though. You could also add economics, financial, and that's what ESG is all about, is looking at the Environment, Social and the Governance side of how you use resources and make products so forth.

[00:14:18] Dominique: Can you paint an example just of just briefly of like working with a big company as from the consultant point of view, the kind of thing they were maybe like starting from and then ending with?

[00:14:29] Neil: They started plant by plant. Where do we have some pressure from the community for dirty air, dirty water? Or maybe they start with a supplier 'cause they're having a problem with the, a certain raw material is, we're throwing half of it away. You know, we gotta get a better, maybe it's packaging. 

So they started with they'd like to call low hanging fruit, and then it evolved into, this has gotta work through all parts of the company, we have to start talking to procurement. They don't just buy the cheapest stuff, they have to ask questions about what's in it and when it comes to suppliers, we just can't ask the suppliers to give us a checklist. We gotta go visit them. 

[00:15:08] Adam: Okay, so you had this career in consulting, but then you ended up in academia.

[00:15:12] Neil: Once ERM started putting started the pieces together in common ownership, the people who owned the regional businesses sold out. And so, I did a little single person consulting for a while and just to shift down from the bigger operation, you know, it just wasn't appealing.

So I got wondering about what would academia look like? And I had somehow been connected with a few universities who were meeting in the summers during the nineties. And it was University of Virginia, University of Michigan. And Cornell and anybody could go to their meetings. These were professors who said, we're gonna get together and talk about sustainability. And so I used to, I was probably still at at ERM when I went to those meetings.

[00:15:56] Dominique: How'd you find that?

[00:15:57] Neil: You know, just in networking or in, in newsletters and stuff. So I went to those meetings and began to see the side that there was a university business interest starting to come together. And being living here in Ohio, I just went in, cold called on a, a dean at Fisher College of Business. And they looked at my resume, 

"Oh, you ought to, you're an engineer, you ought to go to the engineering school." And I said, "Well, it's not an engineering problem, it's a business problem. And other leading business schools are starting to teach this." And the response was, "Well, like who?" And I said, "Well, probably doing the best job is the University of Michigan." and it was true then and close to being true now. 

Well, when you say something like that to Ohio State, the response I got back next was, "You better go develop a syllabus and start next quarter." So, so I had never developed a syllabus. I had read lots of syllabus, but never developed one. So I put together a syllabus.

I got it approved in spring of 2004. The first class there were 20 students in it, which was the minimum you had to have to, to launch a a class. So I put together a curriculum based on my experience and knowledge, and the students liked it a lot. It was the first time they'd heard about this kind of thing. Not at my request, but I found out that most of 'em wrote letters and said, "This ought to be a core course, which it is not, and will not ever probably be", 

[00:17:24] Dominique: Why did this matter to you? Like, why did you feel like, I'm just so curious by the interest in students. 

[00:17:29] Neil: Well, you could tell from their questions in class and class discussion, they, "Oh my God really, really, really? You know. These were MBA classes, the first set of classes I taught, and they could see how some important stuff was not being done, done at the corporate level. Some of 'em were procurement people, some were operations people. They could see, you know, how sustainability might, to their advantage, be worked in.

And because I built my courses as project courses where I got projects from companies for the students to work on in teams, it seemed real to them, that they were working on a, a real company problem. So I think that helped a lot in building student interest and student awareness.

[00:18:13] Adam: Giving that base context of like, "Hey, here's things that you're gonna have to ask questions about which companies aren't addressing."

[00:18:20] Neil: Yeah, yeah. And, and because of my entrepreneurial genes, I could sense that I knew I was doing something that hadn't been done before. That was a boost, you know, and it was being, and it was being accepted, and so maybe I should do more of it. 

Then the undergraduate dean heard about my success in the MBA program, and so he had me develop a similar set of courses for the undergrads, and then EEDS came along and I got to import my courses into the EEDS program.

And it was just sort of that slow, unplanned transition that seemed to work at every corner.

[00:18:55] Adam: And what does EEDS stand for?

[00:18:57] Neil: Environment, Economy, Development and Sustainability. It's a terrible name. And they know that. Uh, but it was strategic, I think, because if they had started with the word sustainability, it would've been chopped off at the head.

But when you stick sustainability in those days at the end, well of course economy's important. That was the first word and development. That's important. 

[00:19:18] Dominique: And I, and I do wanna jump into this on our next episode, so I'm gonna maybe pause us and hold off and getting into the EEDS stuff. 

But I wanted to maybe ask what's the most common like misconception around sustainability you've had with overcoming that knowledge gap with students in particular?

[00:19:34] Neil: Well, it's not so much knowledge gap with students. It's, it's a lack of not, they just haven't thought through the connection

[00:19:41] Dominique: Mm-Hmm

[00:19:42] Neil: Like these floods in the southeast from hurricane, there's still people who haven't made the connection with global warming. They're talking about rebuilding, and this was a 500 year storm. We won't get another one for 500 days. Looks like another 500 hours, they're gonna have one. But the, it's for some people with some experiences, this is so unusual that it must be an aberration, you know? 

The Earth has been around so long and really it must be more stable, and they don't make the connection though this has been predicted for lots and lots of years.

I can remember in 2005 the Stern Report. Stern was the editor of a big research program that ended up with a report on the impact of climate change and what it was gonna cost to deal with it. It was gonna cost some great multiple of GNP to deal with it than to just fix it. And still we're fighting that, fighting that battle.

[00:20:41] Dominique: Well, I'm very excited to dive further. You built a whole sustainability program with the help of others, you're now working on a really amazing challenge, which we'll talk about next time. But today was really great we get get to be able to hear about honestly, the impact of being a boy scout and like being out in nature in a young age.

I think the entrepreneurial edge you've had speaks to the fact that you've overcome working on a topic that was not well understood. Of sustainability and even the word people were using that much or positively using and having to like bridge that gap while trying to do some new things.

I just personally like how much you've been like, "I wanna learn about that thing. I'm gonna go do it, I'm gonna go. Think about sanitation in Alaska, or I'm gonna go to an academic meeting around sustainability." Those are like very notable pieces in your pivots that I don't always do a very good job of just like going to a meeting or going into a space because I want to break into it.

So I think it, it speaks a lot to kind of some part of your journey that that's been a positive thing or Ohio State was like, we didn't have a position or Michigan had no position, and you were like, "I'm gonna make it. Yeah. I think that's definitely, feels like the Neil approach. 

How can our audience support the work that you do or learn more about the things that you do? 

[00:21:55] Neil: Oh, our, our website is, Bronco challenge for sustainable impact, and we have a complicated website, but you, you can get there. 

[00:22:04] Dominique: You are still seeking corporate sponsors for the challenge?

[00:22:07] Neil: Yes, we are just about ready to wrap up for this year, but there will be this academic year, next April or May we'll be starting in again. It's an annual fundraise. 

Money is used to provide awards to students who work in a competitive mode of four people on a team to come up with a new idea. It's, they don't have to build anything, just have an idea, a game changing idea for some problem or issues embedded in one or more of the sustainable development goals. They work in teams of four. They have to form their own teams. They have to be interdisciplinary teams 'cause we get better results when different sources of ideas come in. And the first place team gets $10,000. Second place team gets, uh, $6000. Third place, team gets $3000. 

[00:22:58] Adam: Fantastic. So if you are a student at Western Michigan University, check out the Bronco Challenge for sustainable impact. Or if you're a corporation and you wanna help students really learn how to make some change for one of the UN's sustainable development goals, check it out.

[00:23:14] Neil: Yes. And as sponsors get involved by participating, they have the choice if they would like to be a judge in the final competition, or they can network with the students who may become future interns or employees or customers, 

[00:23:29] Dominique: well, thanks for chatting, Neil. I'm excited. Well, next time we'll dive more into how that challenge came about and then how EEDS came together.

[00:23:35] Adam: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:23:47] Dominique: You can find our episodes at thegreenchampions.com. If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you got questions about sustainability or climate change, you can reach us on our website, thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zane Dweik. Thanks for listening to another episode of Green Champions.

Our next episode will be digging into Neil Drobny's story around building the EEDS program, uh, and building the Bronco Challenge. So join us on our next episode.

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