Agenda
10:30 Rita Schenck Moderator
10:35 Steve Nicholas, Director, Office of Sustainability and Environment, City of Seattle
Introduction and welcome from the Mayor’s office
10:45 Guido Sonnemann, United Nations Environmental Program, Director of Life Cycle Initiative
11:00 John Ryan, US Business Council on Sustainable Development
11:15 Barbara Lither, U.S. EPA Region X
11:30 Tony Gale, City of Seattle
Steve Nicholas is the Director of the Office of Sustainability & Environment for the City of Seattle. Steve’s previous lives include director of the Institute for Sustainable Communities’ NGO capacity-building program in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, senior environmental planner with the Seattle Planning Department, watershed planning and stewardship manager for the King County Department of Natural Resources, and analyst and project manager with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Guido Sonnemann is the Associate Programme Officer, Division of Technology, Industry and Economics - United Nations Environment in Paris. Guido manages the SETAC-UNEP Life Cycle Initiative, a task he is well-qualified for having studied Life Cycle Assessment at the University Rovira y Vigili in Barcelona.
John Ryan has 25 years of experience in the environmental field. He holds degrees in Agricultural and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University. Mr. Ryan is one of the founders of The RETEC Group, which began business in 1985. RETEC is an environmental services firm focused on providing practical and innovative solutions that deliver business value to our industrial client base. With approximately 500 employees, RETEC operates as one company, from 25 locations throughout the United States Mr. Ryan specializes in environmental liability management, EHS assurance and sustainability projects and is RETEC’s representative to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the US Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Barbara J. Lither is currently a Senior Policy Advisor to the USEPA Region 10. She has been employed by the EPA since 1978 and has held increasingly responsible positions with EPA. For most of her career, Ms. Lither was a regulatory attorney enforcing environmental laws, and served as Director of the EPA Region 10 Office of Enforcement. In 1995, she was an Eisenhower Exchange Fellow, studying environmental protection in emerging democracies. Her current work for EPA focuses on sustainability and use of innovative, incentive based environmental protection activities. She was recently part of a team which received a White House Closing the Circle Award for Achieving Sustainable Environmental Stewardship.
Fulton (Tony) Gale III, FAIA is the City Architect and Director of Architecture, Engineering, & Space Planning for the City of Seattle. As a second-generation architect, and 1970 graduate of the UofWA, Tony has been practicing since 1972 as a principal owner of 3 Seattle architectural firms. His career began in Seattle, and then continued in many locations within the United States, Asia and the Mid East. 40 of his projects have been built: 23 in the Pacific NW and 8 in Seattle. 15 of these projects have received 21 awards for multidiscipline design excellence...locally, regionally and nationally. As the Director of Architecture, Engineering and Space Planning, he is responsible for leading the efforts of the project managers within this Division who are managing and/or coordinating the planning, programming, design and construction process for existing and new City owned buildings. This approximately $50 million annual improvement program currently represents 53 projects at 42 separate sites.