“I wanted to work in corporate sustainability,” says Donato Grimaldi (MES ’23). “I knew the Master of Environmental Studies program could get me to where I want to be.”
A West Philadelphia native, Donato grew up enjoying the contrast of city living during the year and summers spent on his family’s dairy farm in rural Italy. “My father was a farmer before he emigrated from Italy to the US,” he shares. “They're very tied to the environment there. The society is inherently sustainable,” he says, as are the farming industry policies and regulations. “My uncle, who runs the farm now, is very progressive in farming techniques. He’s always at workshops or switching to a new agricultural product that’s good for the environment. I learned from the farm to always think about the future and adopt new practices to help sustain the farm.”
As Donato got older, he carried those lessons forward to his college and career plans. “I knew I wanted to solve problems pertaining to the environment; that’s where I could benefit society the most.”
As an undergrad at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, Donato studied environmental engineering and started a sustainability club. “I was getting my feet wet with sustainability,” he shares, as well as homing in on his career goals. Learning that corporations and certain industries were responsible for much of the post-industrial change in the environment, Donato’s professional path became clear: He could make the biggest impact on reducing environmental pollution by helping corporations become sustainability leaders.
With a future in corporate sustainability in mind, Donato determined graduate school was the next step—and his choice of schools was easy. “I knew the direction I wanted to go, the niche of corporate sustainability, and that led me to the Penn MES program.”
Penn’s MES offers an interdisciplinary program, with core coursework in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the opportunity to take courses from other Penn departments and schools. The Environmental Sustainability concentration provides focused options covering corporate sustainability strategies, the environmental impacts of energy, risk management, and more.
“I knew the Environmental Sustainability concentration was right for me,” he shares. “It offered a diverse pool of classes—corporate-focused classes and business classes—and you can tailor the concentration to suit the industry you want.
“Corporate Sustainability Strategies with Linda Froelich was one of my favorite classes,” he says, noting he learned about the constantly evolving discipline of corporate sustainability from a leader in the field. “At Penn,” he says, “I got to work with so many industry and academic experts.”
Energy and Its Impacts from Penn Engineering was another favorite course. “We learned about the risks and side effects of energy production,” he says, a top-polluting industry. He also took a risk management course from the Wharton School of Business, where he quantified future risks, including environmental risks, which are often left unidentified in risk assessments, into clear business costs.
During his studies, Donato also completed two internships. “I got to dive deep into corporate sustainability in different industries,” he says, which helped him focus his job search after graduation.
For his culminating capstone project, Donato took a close look at fracking waste streams as possible sources of valuable chemical resources. “There are many byproducts in fracking that other industries are working hard to get, like cobalt, lithium, and manganese,” he shares. While it is not necessarily cost-effective to extract many of those resources currently, future technology may bring extraction costs down with the added benefit of removing pollutants from fracking wastewater. “I learned about how one industry can produce so many resources for a lot of other industries.” Making those connections between industries, where one company’s by-product serves as another’s raw materials, is called industry symbiosis, he explains. “That’s what I look at now in my work.”
Not long after graduating, Donato launched his career as a corporate social responsibility project engineer for an international label and packaging company. In short, his job involves proving that being good environmental stewards makes good business sense. “A lot of green practices, like landfill reduction and emissions reduction, don’t look great on paper at first because of the short-term costs, but the long-term savings and future risk reduction is what makes it make sense,” he says. “Sustainability is about addressing those future risks right now.”
Donato is currently leading a number of successful landfill reduction projects. “So many of our waste streams are resources for other industries,” he shares. Leveraging industrial symbiosis opportunities, his company has diverted hundreds of metric tons of materials from landfills for new uses, reducing waste while creating revenue streams for his company and providing more affordable raw materials for others.
“A lot of what I learned at Penn drives my daily business decisions,” he says, noting that the Penn MES program got him exactly where he wanted to go. “Corporate sustainability is so much fun,” he smiles. “I’m grateful to wake up every day and work in an industry I love. And I'm excited to see where the industry goes in the future.”
