At a time when talk of a company’s carbon footprint grabs much of the attention in corporate sustainability reports, Black & Veatch engineer Kasey Henneman knows making the world a better place literally can begin at the ground level. And with help from her coworkers in Charleston, South Carolina, she’s got a composting pile to prove it.
The resiliency and nature-based solutions engineer’s home garden has some of the richest dirt imaginable, courtesy of the workplace composting drive that has taken root.
With enthusiastic help from officemates, Henneman — an employee-owner of the Kansas-based global human critical infrastructure leader since 2022 — already has collected hundreds of pounds of otherwise landfill-bound throwaways that now nourish her backyard trove. A smorgasbord of everything from Italian squash to cucumbers, okra, watermelon, blueberries and beets.
That success in repurposing food scraps, paper towels, pizza boxes and coffee grounds feeds her hope that her program launched in 2023 germinates its replication elsewhere for a more sustainable workplace environment.
Henneman’s efforts are an extension of what’s happening across Black & Veatch, the company driven to become “the leader in sustainable infrastructure” has diverted from landfills dozens of tons of compostable waste at its global headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas.
Kasey Henneman
Even before majoring in environmental engineering at Georgia Tech, Henneman had a fervor for getting her hands dirty. As a community gardening program assistant for nearly five years for Five Rivers MetroParks, a conservation-based parks agency in Dayton, Ohio, she coordinated City Beets, a community and youth gardening program that teaches sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurship, job skills and nutrition to youth ages 12 to 15.
That experience ignited my passion for learning various composting processes and understanding the factors that drive or hinder people's engagement with composting.”
Later with Black & Veatch, she saw the opportunity to champion recycling and composting and seized it as something that aligned with the company's sustainability goals. When she first floated it as “a positive and fun approach rather than a shaming culture” in her 25-person Charleston office, coworkers “enthusiastically embraced the idea.”
So out came a 55-gallon pickle drum with holes drilled into the screw-top lid, tucked in an office corner as a repository for food scraps, compostable food containers and other environmentally friendly castoffs.
Our team's proactive and inclusive approach has enhanced the office culture towards a more sustainable, eco-conscious environment,” she said. “For an engineering mind, it makes all the sense.”
“Because corporate sustainability is at the core of our business strategy, we always stive to lead by example. But we know the sustainability mindset begins at the grassroots level with our employee-owners around the globe,” said Deepa Poduval, a Black & Veatch senior vice president and the company’s global sustainability leader. “As our Kasey Henneman demonstrates so well, sometimes the smallest actions can send the biggest messages about doing the right thing for a better world.”
