Sustainability Monthly Lecture Series

Monday, March 6th, 6:30 pm, Freeport Community Center, 53 Depot St.

Refreshments will be served

Susanne Lee (Faculty Fellow at University of Maine)

will share simple solutions and examples of how individual action can lead to ending food waste in Maine, inspiring everyone to take action to reduce, recover, and recycle food waste

Nathan Cronauer

Learn how ecomaine, Maine’s leader in sustainable waste management, goes beyond trash & recycling to aid in the collection and composting of much of Southern Maine’s food waste.  We will discuss different composting methods, from backyard to industrial, and how to reduce our own carbon footprint at work, home, and beyond.

As an entrepreneurial business executive Susanne successfully created, launched and operated multi-million-dollar consumer product brands and businesses with Fortune 100 companies and lean start-ups. As Executive-in-Residence at the Maine Business School (MBS), Susanne utilized her business management and marketing experience to bring the “real-world” into MBS courses. Key accomplishments include innovative initiatives like the Maine Business School Speaker Series: “Thriving Under Thirty”, the UMaine/MBS experiential learning, “Corporate Classroom” at Hannaford corporate offices, and “live'' case studies with Bangor Savings, JC Penney, and more. Susanne’s most popular MBS coursework focused on sustainable business and marketing, highlighting companies like Patagonia, whose superior “triple bottom line” strategy benefits “profits, people and the planet”. In 2019, Susanne was awarded a Mitchell Center grant to fund a multidisciplinary student research project identifying sustainable, “triple bottom line” zero-waste food solutions for Maine. Susanne joined the Mitchell Center as a Faculty Fellow in Fall 2021 in the Mitchell Center’s Materials Management team. Within that transdisciplinary group, Susanne leads a student/faculty team working directly with state, business, and community stakeholders, as well as national and global food waste experts like ReFED and Harvard Food Law & Policy, to develop solutions to end food waste in Maine.  Each year, students implement a number of stakeholder-driven pilots to help Maine communities and organizations build a sustainable, waste-free, circular food system. Statewide progress is shared through the April Maine Food Waste Solutions Summit.

Nate joined ecomaine as an Environmental Educator in February 2022. His passion for sustainable waste management began early on, helping his dad make runs to their local transfer station as a kid. The sights, the sounds, and sometimes even the smells got the gears in his brain turning! Where does this stuff end up? How do we get rid of it? And what can be done to reduce the mountains of waste amassing around the world? Nate saw a beautiful pragmatism in how we deal with our discarded resources and was hooked. From starting a recycling club in high school to earning a B.A. at the University of Southern Maine in Environmental Planning and Policy, with a concentration on Municipal Solid Waste management, he’s fascinated by finding the best environmental and economic solutions to our waste systems. Nate has held several positions in the sustainable waste management industry, including Green Team Leader for Whole Foods Market Portland, Waste Crew Lead and Program Developer of Eco-Reps at University of Southern Maine, Co-coordinator for the Compost and Recycling tent for the Common Ground Fair/(MOFGA), and lead outreach associate for Maine Green Power. This experience has given Nate a unique perspective into many facets of the sustainable waste industry and has helped to develop a well-rounded and informed approach on how to best tackle current waste sector and environmental problems.