We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Currie-Halpern recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sarah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

I was born and raised in Greenwich, CT in the 1980’s. At the time, recycling was just beginning across the country, and I had the privilege as a young child of helping my Mom work on the first recycling program for my town. This spawned a lifelong awareness for this massive problem of the waste human beings generate, and from that point on I knew it was my job to do something to reduce this problem and take better care of nature and animals, in general.

Fast forward to Think Zero LLC, founded by me and my business partner Ushma Pandya Mehta in Fall 2016, we work with corporations, and real estate owners and developers to not only reduce and divert more waste, but also to change their workforce’s mindset about waste and encourage a culture that is more sustainability-minded.

An engagement with Think Zero typically starts with a waste audit, where our team audits one day’s worth of waste and provides a detailed waste audit report to understand how much waste the company is generating, what’s in the waste stream, and what we can do to reduce and divert more waste. We help companies set realistic waste goals and then develop programming, marketing & communications, and operational changes that will help them reach these goals.

I am most proud of our work with our retainer, or long-term clients, where we have seen meaningful reductions in their YoY waste generated, increases across the board in diversion rates, and a general mindset within their staff and tenants of thinking about what they put in the bin and how they can both recycle right and put less materials in the bins.

Sarah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was born and raised in Greenwich, CT in the early 1980’s. At the time, recycling was just beginning across the country, and I had a privilege as a young child of helping my Mom work on the first recycling program for my town. This spawned a lifelong awareness in this massive problem of the waste human beings generate, and from that point on I knew it was my job to do something to reduce this problem and take better care of nature and animals, in general.

Fast forward to Think Zero LLC, founded by me and my business partner Ushma Pandya Mehta in Fall 2016, we work with corporations, and real estate owners and developers to not only reduce and divert more waste, but also to change their workforce’s mindset about waste and encourage a culture that is more sustainability-minded.

An engagement with Think Zero typically starts with a waste audit, where our team audits the waste and provides a detailed waste audit report to understand how much waste the company is generating, what’s in the waste stream, and what we can do to reduce and divert more waste. We help companies set realistic waste goals and then develop programming, marketing & communications, and operational changes that will help them reach these goals.

I am most proud of our work with our retainer, or long-term clients, where we have seen meaningful reductions in their YoY waste generated, increases across the board in diversion rates, and a general mindset within their staff and tenants of thinking about what they put in the bin and how they can both recycle right and put less materials in the bins.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

I was working for the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability in NYC and had two small daughters, one was 3 and the other was 1 and still in diapers. I cloth diapered all my children, and at that time I had reached out on a neighborhood group to look for some used cloth diapers to buy, as I was a little low on them and needed a few more. Ushma reached out to me within a few hours of my post and invited me to come by to look at the cloth diapers she was selling. One day after work that week, my daughters and I went to visit Ushma and her family, who lived 2 blocks away from us in TriBeCa, NYC. Ushma’s daughters were a little older than mine and her youngest was recently out of diapers. We hit it off immediately talking about our mutual passion of sustainability and waste. I met her sweet Mom (who is now deceased) and her two daughters. I had already come up with the idea of a waste reduction and diversion consultancy called Think Zero, and as I left that day, I knew I had to pitch it to her to see if she would be interested in joining me to start this new firm. A few weeks later we met and she liked the idea, however it took a few months to convince her to start the business together. Our husbands love to joke that we bonded over, and shared our kids, used underwear!

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

We are a mostly remote business so we put a lot of trust in our employees to get their work done without us looking over their shoulders. We have twice weekly, hour long team meetings where everyone, including my business partner and I, are held accountable to the work we committed to get done and the deadlines we agreed to meet.

We encourage our employees to grow by getting certified in an area that relates to our business but also mosts interests them. If they have a particular topic related to waste and sustainability that they are most passionate about, we encourage them to spend some time reading up on it, writing about it and posting it on our blog, attending events related to it, etc. We have found that with this model, everyone works hard and gets the job done, but appreciates relative flexibility and freedom, and the ability to do more of their personal stuff during work hours.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thinkzerollc.com
• Instagram: @thinkzerollc
• Facebook: @thinkzerollc
• Linkedin: @thinkzerollc