This webinar will introduce several innovative policy ideas that support clean materials, clean production, enhanced product lifespans, and reduced waste.
These policy innovations were recently daylit in a landmark report to Oregon’s legislature on opportunities for the state to reduce its consumption-based GHG emissions. While many of these emissions physically originate outside of Oregon’s borders, the study uncovered rich opportunities to reduce them through state policy, and in doing so, to level the playing field between in- and out-of-state producers, while delivering benefits to in-state producers, communities, and the environment.
Several of these policy innovations have already been adopted, as part of Oregon’s Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act. The Act, which goes into effect this summer, is more than just a recycling law. It includes pioneering policy elements, such as: product stewardship mandates on global producers; mandates, incentives, and standards for assessment and disclosure of life cycle environmental impacts; and a new program to reduce life cycle environmental impacts of packaging and printed paper through means other than recycling. Related efforts involving building materials are also underway in Oregon as part of the state’s work to reduce embodied carbon in the built environment.
Speakers
Mel Clark, President & CEO, CleanTech Alliance
Mel Clark is a leader with 25 years of nonprofit experience, as well as for-profit business experience in real estate and human resources. She has a demonstrated track record of strong fiscal stewardship and program development. She joined the CleanTech Alliance in April 2020.
She has two adult children, one in college studying computer science, the other a theatre technician at Disneyland.
She was born in Massachusetts, raised in Kansas, spent summers on the beach in Connecticut, and attended colleges in New York and Washington. She is a life-long learner, and loves to read, travel, cook, bake, and garden, and enjoys hiking, yoga, swimming, diving, and tolerates running (long enough to finish a marathon in 2017).
David Allaway, Senior Policy Analyst, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ)
David Allaway has worked at the intersection of waste, materials, and environment for over thirty years. He is currently a senior policy analyst in the Materials Management Program at the
Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). David has served as an invited science advisor to Wal-Mart’s Packaging Sustainable Value Network and as an advisor to the New York
Times bestseller Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. He recently (2019-2020) co-chaired Oregon’s Recycling Steering Committee and helped to develop and advance Oregon’s Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act – comprehensive recycling and producer responsibility legislation which was signed into law in 2021.
Please join us on Thursday, May 22 from 12:30-1:30pm PT to learn more about these and other new frontiers in clean materials policy. Registration is free.