Senior Consultant

Todd R. Heller is a practicing international environmental management and development specialist with 40 years of experience. He has worked with the chemical and petrochemical, pharmaceutical, food, rubber and plastics, automotive, transportation, recycling, and aerospace industries to create and maintain environmental management programs based on continual improvement and sustainability.

His work entails the thoughtful application of Environmental Management Systems (EMS); pollution prevention, waste reduction and natural resource minimization; Life Cycle Assessment (LCA); stakeholder requirements, substances of concern (SOCs), restricted and reportable material use; material substitution; lean manufacturing; Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), GHG measurement and reduction techniques and circular economy. Recognizing the increasing influence and effectiveness of these implements through EMS and impressed by Sustainable Endeavour’s Eco-costs approach, Todd became an associate member of Sustainable Endeavor in 2011. Todd’s latest project with Sustainable Endeavor is to bundle the environmental tools he’s worked with into a seamless, broadly applied, cost effective sustainability management system and share it with the emerging, practical, innovative, sustainable economy.

As an undergraduate, Todd studied International Relations at the George Washington University in Washington D.C., focusing on Africa, Economics and French. This undergraduate program was followed by two years as an agricultural / environmental education and reforestation planner in Tchamba, Togo.
He has two master’s degrees: one in French translation from Kent State University and a second in regional development planning from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Following these studies, Todd accepted a marketing and development position with The Creighton Group, Environmental Management Consultants, first in Washington D.C. and eventually in Bangkok, a joint enture with Oiltools, Thailand. He specialized in environmental consulting, training, assessment, auditing and implementing new projects such as BS 7750 and the initial versions of ISO 14001:96.

Todd staged, participated in and passed one of the first accredited advanced EMS auditor training courses in 1996. Upon returning from Thailand, Todd accepted a position to develop and accredit ISO 14001 auditing and training programs with AQSR/Omnex, a primarily automotive registrar in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This achieved in 1999, he was certified as an international lead EMS auditor by the Canadian Environmental Auditing Association (CEAA) in 2000 and the Institute for Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) in 2001, of which he remains a member. He has continued in the EMS auditing, consulting and training practice ever since. He served as AQSR’s EMS audit program administrator, certification reviewer and Lead Auditor until AQSR was acquired by Bureau Veritas Certification in 2003. At that time, Todd became an independent contract auditor for several registrars, eventually settling in almost exclusively with Bureau Veritas. During this period, Todd became acquainted with sustainability concepts and Sustainable Endeavor’s Eco-costs analyses. Having lived and worked extensively throughout West Africa, Europe, South America and North America, Todd takes great pride in a keen ability to assess and comprehend alternative perspectives, learn languages and bridge communication gaps. He is a citizen of the United States and Portugal and works in French, Portuguese, Spanish and English. He has also studied the African Hausa language in Niger and at Nigeria’s Bayero University in Kano.