Andrew Toth

Brainstormer, Change Agent, Concerned citizen, Connector, Consultant, Designer, Engineer, Environmentalist, Event planner, Explorer, Idea generator, Philanthropist, Student, World traveler

I’m from Colby, Kansas, a small town of less than 5,000 people. I studied Civil Engineering at the University of Kansas, and then went to Hamburg, Germany for three years to do a couple masters degrees. I’ve been in the States since mid-2015 working at a firm called Burns & McDonnell. I am 28. My favorite things to do are road biking and rock climbing. When in my “normal” routine (i.e. not traveling), I do yoga and/or meditate daily. I am people-oriented and I appreciate deep and honest conversations. I spend a lot of my weekends in the mountains. I work as an environmental engineer, and my work involves designing water infrastructure. For the past two years, I have lived and worked in Atlanta, and I recently moved to Denver. What makes me most excited? Meeting new people, having deep conversations about things that matter, new and good ideas/concepts, and public speaking. I also love to cook, throw dinner parties, host people, and plan trips.

Connecting people with people. It's one of my favorite things. I love to connect a person with the exact right person who can help them achieve their goals. Recently a colleague told me of her goal to move to Costa Rica and enter the sustainable agriculture scene there. I connected her with a former classmate of mine from grad school who is from Costa Rica and currently lives in Holland. The two have very similar goals (my former classmate also wants to return to her home country). What's more, my former classmate has a father who owns land, has a farm, and is looking for people who want to take a risk and help him farm. It was a perfect connection, and that gave me loads of energy.

The systems upon which we rely so much are incredibly fragile. Energy production systems, water production and delivery systems, wastewater treatment and conveyance systems, food production systems: they are all centralized and therefore susceptible to failure that could affect thousands--if not millions--of people. The solution: decentralized systems. For example: decentralized energy production, decentralized food production, decentralized water filtration, decentralized wastewater treatment. Everything we need could technically be decentralized. Built for small communities of 100 to...5,000 people. Everything would be local. But it could still be connected so that every system has half a dozen backup (i.e. neighboring) systems. In a city like Denver, a city of almost 700,000, you might have 100 or 200 water/wastewater treatment plants (with each one connected to the surrounding 4 or 5 to provide incredible redundancy). Each household could have its own energy production from wind, solar, and/or geothermal. And these are connected to the neighbors' houses to form a microgrid. Food could be produced in each neighborhood for each neighborhood. If one neighborhood were to run out of food, they could call on the surrounding neighborhoods' farms. The systematic resiliency and redundancy would be incredible! Some may argue: that would be too expensive because you would have to distribute the production centers. Yes, it would be expensive at first, but it is also expensive to lay miles of pipe from each household to a centralized water/wastewater treatment plant, and to string miles of high-voltage distribution wire from each neighborhood to a centralized power plant. For example, on average, 80-90% of a water/wastewater system's costs are in pipes. You wouldn't need much pipe if the treatment plant were less than a half mile away. And the pipe diameter would be smaller than in large cities with huge sewers and large-diameter water mains. That would save money. That would save energy. And it would make the systems upon which we rely much less prone to failure caused by natural disasters, terrorist attack, technical malfunction.

Electronics Recycling, Resource Recovery, Sustainable Design, Systems Thinking, Wastewater, Water