About Really ReUseful
When I started writing on Medium a few years ago, my focus was having an outlet for my creative writing, especially poetry, which I’ve written since I was a child. My “day job” consists of being a sustainability scientist, specifically a member of a sustainability technical assistance program at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), one of five state scientific surveys housed within the Prairie Research Institute on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In everyday language, that means I’m part of a group that helps all types of organizations, public and private, throughout Illinois and sometimes beyond, to make their operations more sustainable. This November, I will have been with ISTC for 22 years, and over the course of a few decades, I’ve worked on a wide variety of projects focused on pollution prevention, organizational sustainability, sustainable electronics, food waste, and zero waste in general. Writing is a huge part of what I do every day, but the writing I do for my job, while often interesting and always fulfilling, isn’t usually what one might characterize as fun. It’s technical, or often it involves translating technical information into forms more digestible for those without technical expertise in a given topic. I write recommendation reports for clients, analyses, case studies, fact sheets, website content, guidance documents, proposals, progress reports for funding…
