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Meet Rachana
Rachana is a nature lover, climate activist, and Founder of Aspire to Zero, Zero Waste Consultancy. From her childhood, being involved in beach and trail cleanups left a strong impression of the great power and responsibility humans have to preserve and care for the Earth, our shared home. With 8 years experience as an Information Technology consultant, she learned to bridge the gap between business users and technologists. Thus she strengthened a skill in consensus-building she had used all her life—getting people with different viewpoints to consider the needs of the other side. Meanwhile, the climate crisis was growing into a problem so big, Rachana felt a strong pull to answer the call to action. She decided to put her problem solving skills to use in that space and enrolled in a Masters program studying sustainability.
A few years later, after graduating from the University of Michigan with a MS/MBA in Environmental Sustainability, Rachana started a family, but she never stopped focusing on the many ways humans can reduce and aspire to eliminate the idea of waste. She has assisted large institutions to create detailed waste assessments and phased approaches to waste reduction. She worked for companies with out-of-box approaches to eliminate waste such as TerraCycle. She has worked on environmental education and zero-waste initiatives at public schools, libraries, and non-profits. She even tackled both waste management and sustaining livelihood for waste pickers, some of the poorest workers, in India to learn about the waste challenges abroad.
Rachana understands that different organizations have different goals, timelines, and considerations with regards to sustainability and waste reduction. She has the experience and flexibility to work with any size organization over their best-suited time frame, in sync with the shared vision of reducing, or eliminating, waste.