Allen Hershkowitz

Dr. Allen Hershkowitz is a Senior Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, specializing in issues related to sustainable development, supply chain management, industrial ecology, the paper industry, health risks, solid waste management, recycling, medical wastes, and sludge. He joined the senior staff of NRDC on February 6, 1989 and is the Director of NRDC’s National Solid Waste Project and NRDC’s Paper Industry Reform Project.

Dr. Hershkowitz is coordinator of some of the world’s most prominent institutional greening initiatives and supply chain ecological assessments: Working with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences he coordinated the greening of the 2007 and 2008 Academy Awards telecast and related events; Working with the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences [NARAS] he coordinated the greening of the 50th Anniversary GRAMMY Awards and the 51st GRAMMY Awards and all NARAS offices; he serves on the Steering Committee of the “Broadway Goes Green” initiative, which he helped establish; his work as the coordinator of “The Greening of Major League Baseball”, “The Greening of the National Basketball Association”, “Greening the USTA” and “The Greening of the National Hockey League”, earned him the US EPA’s “Environmental Merit Award” in 2008. This work involves coordinating supply chain management with the head of league operations and the Commissioners of MLB, the NBA, the USTA and the NHL and supplying environmental information resources specific for each team in those professional sports leagues. He is the coordinator in charge of greening the Warner Music Group and EMI/Capitol Virgin Records, two of the world’s largest music companies, and he is an advisor to Disney Music. Dr. Hershkowitz is also the Corporate Social Responsibility Advisory Director of the Board of the Sims Group, among the world’s largest publicly traded scrap metal processing companies.

Dr. Hershkowitz serves on the DuPont Corporation’s Bio-Based Fuels Life Cycle Assessment Advisory Board. He has served on the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council Committee on the Health Effects of Waste Incineration. Previously he has served as the Chairman of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner's Advisory Board on Operating Requirements for Municipal Solid Waste Incinerators. He has also served on the EPA's Science Advisory Board Subcommittee on Sludge Incineration, as well as the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's Peer Review Panel for it's Report to Congress on the Health Implications of Medical Waste. Dr. Hershkowitz was the Principal Contractor for the United States Congressional Office of Technology Assessment's Report to Congress on Municipal Solid Waste Management. He was a member of the U.S. EPA's Regulatory Negotiations on Fugitive Emissions from Equipment Leaks at Synthetic and Organic Chemical Manufacturing Industries. Dr. Hershkowitz served on the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Committee on Worker Training and Waste-to-Energy plants, he has been invited to serve as a discussant at international gatherings of environmental officials by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and has been invited to present his research findings on sustainable industrial development before the United Nations Environment Program in Paris. Prior to joining NRDC he was the Director of Solid Waste Research at INFORM, an environmental research group. He has performed solid waste management strategic assessments in Japan and Europe, as well as throughout the U.S.

Dr. Hershkowitz was a principal author of President Clinton’s “Greening the Government” Executive Order # 12873, which was signed by the President in October of 1993, and he is a member of the Society of Conservation Biologists, the Pulp and Paper Technical Association of Canada, the Technical Association of Pulp and Paper Industries, the New York Academy of Sciences and the International Society of Industrial Ecology. He was the originator and project coordinator of the Bronx Community Paper Company project, a 400,000 tons per year paper recycling, brownfield reclamation and sustainable community development project in New York City.

Besides the US EPA’s “Environmental Merit Award” in 2008, he was awarded a Special Citation by the Honors Committee of the American Institute of Architects in 2002 for his work on the Bronx paper mill project. In 2004 he was awarded the “Friend of the Hudson” award by Scenic Hudson, the organization’s highest award.

Dr. Hershkowitz served on the editorial board of OnEarth Magazine from 2006 to 2008. He has served on numerous advisory and regulatory bodies throughout the U.S. and in Central America and has served as an advisor to numerous municipalities, legislative bodies, trade groups and environmental organizations in the United States, Europe, Japan and Central America. He also served as a principal technical advisor on public health and solid waste issues to the Belize Association of Conservation NGOs, the Belize Zoo and the Tropical Education Center. In the 1980s and 1990s he led numerous fact-finding missions for local, state, and national government officials to study waste management and recycling policies and practices in Japan and Europe, including a Congressional (Senate and House members) research tour. In 1989 Dr. Hershkowitz was a delegate to the United Nations Treaty Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes, where he worked to prevent the dumping by first world nations of hazardous wastes into less developed countries. Dr. Hershkowitz regularly advises government, NGO and corporate officials in the U.S., Europe, Central America and Japan and testifies frequently before government agencies, House and Senate Congressional committees, and state and local agencies.

Dr. Hershkowitz has been an advisor to a number of socially responsible investment funds including EarthRise Capital, and Rockefeller and Company’s Socially Responsive Investment Group and he has been invited to lecture at universities throughout the U.S. and Europe including the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences, the Graduate School of Organization and Management at Yale, Sloan Business School at M.I.T., Columbia University Graduate School of Business, Duke Law School, Princeton University, the University of London, the Wharton School of Economics, N.Y.U. and the Filene Center for Environmental Science at Tufts University. Dr. Hershkowitz served on the Board of Directors of the Recycled Paper Coalition and the Chicago-based Center for Labor and Community Research and he is listed in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in Science and Engineering.

Dr. Hershkowitz is author of Bronx Ecology: Blueprint for a New Environmentalism (Island Press, 2002) a book on sustainable community development and industrial ecology. He served on the National Research Council committee that wrote Waste Incineration & Public Health, (National Academy Press: Washington, DEC 2000), and his other publications include Too Good To Throw Away: Recycling’s Proven Record (New York: NRDC, 1997); Garbage Management in Japan (New York: INFORM, 1987); Garbage Burning: Lessons from Europe (New York: INFORM, 1986); and Garbage: Practices, Problems and Remedies (New York: INFORM, 1988). He has also published many articles in Environmental Impact Assessment Review (MIT); PTMS (Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations); Technology Review (numerous, including cover story),The New York Times; Social Research; The Atlantic Monthly; Newsday; The Nation; City Limits; Amicus Journal; and the American Book Review.

Dr. Hershkowitz appears regularly on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and NPR news and was featured on the CBS news program “60 Minutes” in November 2008. He has appeared in television and radio shows in more than fifty countries including “20/20”, “Larry King Live”, “Crossfire”, “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather”, “Good Morning America”, “CBS This Morning”, “ABC Evening News”, “Adam Smith’s Money World”, “NY Up-Close” on NY1, “CNN Business News”, “CNN Evening News”, CNBC and National Public Radio. He is regularly quoted in newspapers and journals throughout the U.S. including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone Magazine, BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune as well as the trade press.

Dr. Hershkowitz’s work has been the subject of numerous profiles and feature articles: The December 2008 issue of “Sustainability” Magazine featured him on its cover. He was the subject of a ten-page feature in The New Yorker (July 1995). He is the principal subject of Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings and the Corporate Squeeze by Lis Harris, a book on sustainable industrial development, published by Houghton Mifflin in March 2003.

He received his Ph.D. in political economics from the City University of New York Graduate School in 1986, specializing in energy resources economics; an M. Phil in political economics in 1982; a B.A. (cum laude) from the City College of New York in 1978, and; a Certificat D’assiduite from the University of Grenoble in 1975.