Meet Brian Iezzi ‘16, a former and founding member of the Sustainability Stewards who is currently making a global impact as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan.
How has your experience with the Sustainability Stewards influenced your personal or professional pursuits?
It’s influenced it greatly in a lot of dimensions. Professionally, as a graduate student, and still, I’ve been involved in life cycle assessment education in East Africa, helping students interested in conducting their own LCAs on key projects such as waste management and alternative fuels. I am also actively involved in moving the textile industry towards more circular systems, specifically in sorting and recycling, through a start-up I am working on. Personally, the program taught me so much about myself and how important it is to interact with people to drive sustainable change.
What advice would you give to current or future sustainability leaders based on your experience?
Sustainability is not a concrete definition and what we define as being sustainable is constantly evolving, so it is very important to stay active and engaged in new developments, whether it be new calculation indices for circularity or bringing more interdisciplinary viewpoints into solution-making efforts.
What’s your favorite memory as a Sustainability Steward?
I can’t imagine what undergrad would have been like without the Stewards. I was lucky enough to help start the program my freshman year, so I had 4+ years of fun with some of the most inspirational, down-to-earth, and just awesome people I’ve ever met. My favorite memory is probably building the Hodge Podge Lodge for Shack-A-Thon, it was a crazy weekend pulling together a bunch of random odds and ends at a Steward’s dad’s cabinet shop in Gastonia, collecting bottles from tailgating, and some old bamboo from a friends backyard to put the whole thing together, truly unforgettable.
Where Are They Now?
Meet Former Sustainability Stewards