Dream job 2.0: As companies get serious about the environment, sustainability consultants are in demand

Source: Diane Peters · THE GLOBE AND MAIL · | May 3, 2021

EcoAmmo’s Stephani Carter, pictured here at Edmonton’s priMED Mosaic Centre, went from a career as an interior designer to founding a sustainability consultancy.

The nature of work and what it means to achieve your dream job is changing. In this series, we dive into some of the most aspirational jobs coveted by a new generation.

As a child, Stephani Carter drew floor plans of her bedroom, mocking up furniture rearrangements before enlisting her parents to move things around.

Carter’s grandfather had been an architect and her father owned an excavation company in Edmonton, so Carter spent her childhood thinking about buildings. “I got an appreciation for design,” she says.

After studying interior design at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), Carter worked for a commercial-design company and was struck by the amount of waste in the industry.

“A new company would move into an office space and the finishes would still be good, the carpet still fine, but they’d want to put in their own colour scheme,” she says. “They’d clear it out, and all of it would go to landfill.”

Carter says when she realized that this was happening in office towers all over the world, “the scale really got to me.”

She began asking suppliers about the origins of building materials, but no one could answer her questions. She learned all she could, building expertise in sustainably-sourced products, and people in the industry started asking her to educate them.

In 2006, Carter launched EcoAmmo, a sustainability-consulting firm. “There was no firm like mine at the time,” she says.

Carter and her team began consulting with clients who wanted to source green building materials. When Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification started taking off, the firm began helping companies through the process.

Now, Carter and her team of eight staff members work on a range of green-design and building-certification processes and help companies with solid, air and water waste in operations.