Students from the Spring 2024 offering of ENVIR 480, Sustainability Consulting Practicum, hit it out of the park last week with their presentation on super-gas user conversion to electric vehicles!

In ENVIR 480, students are split into teams and paired with local Seattle organizations — often either businesses or nonprofits — to work on a client project that advances sustainability in the respective sector. This provides an introduction to the field of environmental consulting, and requires students to work together under a tight 10-week quarter deadline to collect and analyze data that will inform recommended next steps.

This past quarter, one team of students including Zola Ontiveros, Deja Jackson, Sophie Stetkiewicz, Callum Mitchell, and Zjada Baydass worked with Coltura, an environmental nonprofit striving to improve climate, health, and equity by developing policies that facilitate a switch from gasoline to cleaner alternative fuels. The students collected primary research on gasoline usage and EVs through the form of in-depth personal interviews, and used their data to develop a customized set of recommendations for the Coltura team. Congratulations to our wonderful students on an amazing quarter of work, and a special thank you to Professor Fred Pursell for his guidance, mentorship, and instruction of ENVIR 480’s Spring iteration.