Mark Costello: The people bring you through it.

Welcome back team.

Today We’re talking with Mark Costello, From Baltimore MD

Until Recently, Mark was with the company Wasted, which builds  sustainable sanitation systems as an alternative to traditional waste management. Now looking for his next role in climate action, Mark fills us in on the ups and downs of the hunt in the market today and how he stays inspired.  

Can’t wait for you to meet him, Lets get to work!

Transcript

The planet, we're big fans, and it needs some help. We're going to skip the part where we convince you that humans have caused a tremendous change in the climate since roughly the 1700s. We're also going to skip over a bunch of terrifying statistics and doom and gloom stories.

We know you've heard all of that. We are regular people, you might say climate curious, that want to help and don't know where we can jump in yet. Welcome to Team Climate, a show about what it really looks like to do climate work.

This is real, and this is bigger than all of us, and it's going to take all of us to change it. My name is Jeffrey Brian Potter. I'm a senior product designer in the FinTech space.

My co-host, Kristin Shaw, is the head of growth for a consulting agency, and the national marketing chair for a clean tech accelerator. Each episode, we're going to be talking with someone in the field, doing the real work it takes to make change. We hope this inspires you to jump in too, because we're going to need you.

Welcome back, team. Today we're talking with Mark Costello from Baltimore, Maryland. Until recently, Mark was with the company Wasted, which builds sustainable sanitation systems as an alternative to traditional waste management.

Now Mark is looking for his next role in climate action. He fills us in on the ups and downs of the hunt in the market today and how he stays inspired. I can't wait for you to meet him.

So let's get to work.

Mark Costello, how are you today?

I'm doing well, Jeff. Thanks for asking. And Kristen, I'm doing well as well.

Happy to be here.

Thank you. We're happy to have you, of course.

How are you doing today?

I am doing great. Had a very busy day. I'm not climate-related, so very happy to be talking to you guys this evening.

Cool.

So Mark, you're in an interesting place because you are a pivoter right now. Not exactly industry-to-industry but in-between roles at the moment. Do you want to start a little bit about how you got your start and how you turned to the climate industry?

Yeah, absolutely. Kind of happy to tell my story there. So formally, I was off-grid director of sales and solutions at a climate tech company called Wasted.

So they are working on circular sanitation. So not always immediately clear in the climate industry, but I'm happy to kind of dive deeper into that. And yeah, just kind of going into my story a little bit.

So I was working in traditional corporate industry. I was at this steel company for eight years. Like a lot of people, I think post-COVID just kind of got burnt out and wanted to have a change.

So I decided to take a sabbatical and kind of pursue a lifelong dream of through hiking the Appalachian Trail. So I spent six months in the woods, and as you can imagine, a lot of time with your thoughts, kind of thinking about what my next steps were going to be. And I think all that immersive time in nature just kind of made me realize that I wanted to do something a little bit more mission driven.

And what was a big change, kind of a turning point for me is realizing that we have a lot of the solutions to fix some of the environmental problems. It's just kind of adopting those solutions and bringing on like systems change. So definitely not an easy task, but you don't have to be a scientist or an engineer.

We need people that are communicating, scaling and selling these solutions. So that's kind of the very quick intro and how that pivot was kind of inspired.

I have a temptation to have a lot of camping questions because I'm a camper myself, and there's always like another problem to solve and another and another and another. But well, that's another podcast.

Yeah.

So how did you come to Wasted or Wasted come to you?

Yeah. So I very much agree. You should bring it in when it comes to me talking about camping, hiking or backpacking because I can talk for hours on end.

So I appreciate you kind of cutting it off there. But yeah, it was a very intentional pivot. So coming off of this kind of like once in a lifetime opportunity to kind of go after that very like goal-oriented thing of walking in a straight line for 2,000 miles, I was very motivated to be like, okay, what can I go and do now?

So I took a climate reskilling and education course called the TerraDoo Learning for Action course. So it's 12 weeks talking about the problem solution landscape. So everything from the carbon budget and the hydrological cycle to carbon accounting and climate finance.

So I think what was good there is getting a baseline knowledge of knowing how to speak the terms and being able to talk to potential employers that, okay, more than just, I listened to a podcast, I actually took this very intentional reskilling course and not wanting to go back to school to get a different degree, I figured that was a good compromise. So yeah, it was very intentional. So a lot of networking, job boards, but ultimately connected with Wasted because they were doing kind of a non-networked alternative to the backcountry toilet, so the backcountry latrine.

And I was like, hey, I just came off of this long distance backpacking and have an inclination to work in climate and a sales background. So it just kind of matched up really well.

With the sales background applied to any skillset, any industry, I think steel in particular would be pretty interesting. You must have had to know that world pretty well. The chemistry and how it's made in different types of steel and what it's used for and da-da-da-da-da.

And so how has it been sort of applying that skillset to a new field?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think kind of will be some good insight for the listeners, where kind of selling a technical product that maybe you don't have. I didn't have a metallurgy degree, but as you said, I was selling to engineers and finance people and operations people who had a very like intimate knowledge of the chemistry and mechanical properties of steel.

So I think that's kind of speaks to talking about transferable skills, where you can say, okay, maybe intimately know deep decarbonization of the energy grid, or take whatever climate sector you want, but you say, okay, I was able to be trained and learn on this technical product and translate that into something that is easily communicable and kind of have the proof in the pudding that, okay, I can sell a technical solution so that can transfer to something else.

Yeah, exactly. And with engineers, gosh, I'm sure they had tons of questions and like you really had to walk the walk.