Denise Braun has been fascinated with zero waste strategies even before she was familiar with the concept, beginning around nine years old while growing up in São Paulo, Brazil. This passion eventually led her to open her own waste-related consulting firm, All About Waste.
Denise discusses this in her story for Living Standard, where she also talks about a truly innovative project that inspires her to this day:
Green building and zero waste certifications transform communities from Living Standard on Vimeo.
She elaborates, “When I opened All About Waste, the majority of our projects were conducting waste audits for the big commercial real estate companies such as Kilroy, Tishman Speyer, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, and so on. Eventually I was fortunate enough to work with GBCI on achieving TRUE certification for the largest high-rise building in San Francisco. From that point forward, we started getting more and more projects, and I became hooked on TRUE.”
Denise is also excited about TRUE’s precertification program. “TRUE precertification is what I like to call a ‘zero waste pathway for all,’” she explains. “It’s very democratic in the sense that any facility can get precertified. As long as you can show that a project has implemented zero waste best practices and can demonstrate that the groundwork toward zero waste has been laid, the project will not have to meet the 90% diversion from landfill and incineration as is required for the full TRUE certification. It’s a great pathway because it really helps you take that first step in looking at your facilities’ operations, and it allows you to pinpoint the strategies that will help increase the diversion rate and eventually achieve zero waste status.”
Read the rest of Denise’s story at Living Standard