Consulting for a more sustainable future in Philadelphia and beyond

For the student consultants of Penn Sustainability Consulting (PSC) and their off-campus clients, the partnership is mutually beneficial. The students provide a range of pro bono services to businesses, nonprofits, and government organizations, and clients provide a variety of real-world settings for students to enhance their skills in project management, policy research, presentations, client communication, and more.

Founded in 2020, PSC is an undergraduate and graduate student group that provides clients with services such as life cycle assessment, exploration of alternative materials, identification of grant funding opportunities, policy and legal review, and assistance with B Corp certification, a designation for businesses that meet certain social, environmental, and governance standards.

Club president Kasey Lee, a fourth-year environmental studies and finance major from Orange County, California, notes that PSC is helping PennFuture—a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization—compare Pennsylvania’s environmental justice policies and regulations to those of other states. In the past, Lee has helped a startup incubator and a waste reduction nonprofit find organizations to work with, and other students have helped a bakery and candle company with sustainable operations.

“Penn has a very problem-solving-oriented approach to sustainability,” says vice president of internal affairs Sandro Mocciolo, a fourth-year environmental studies and math major from West Hartford, Connecticut. He credits the culture at Penn for PSC’s ability to blossom, and he praises Penn Sustainability, Penn Climate, and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy for making him “not only more passionate about these issues but also more educated.”

Penn Today spoke with two PSC clients about their experiences.

A less costly, more sustainable approach to baby gear

After Bo Zhao became a mom in 2018, she felt frustrated with all the baby gear she used only briefly or not at all, resulting in wasted money and clutter. “I found myself wishing there was a way I could try the gear at home, with my baby, because babies are really opinionated and you’re not going to know what they like beforehand—and when I was done, it would just magically disappear,” says Zhao, a Wharton Executive MBA alumnus.

In 2020, she founded Baby Gear Group, allowing parents to rent baby gear and have it delivered. It has expanded from Philadelphia to 10 locations across seven states.

She began working with Penn Sustainability Consulting after Sravanthi Mundluru, a fourth-year finance and management major from India, reached out. Zhao says the students helped with financial projections of different pricing models, marketing and branding, and impact metrics.

One impact metric is how close Baby Gear Group branches are to landfills—Zhao not only cares about reducing the flow of items to landfills, but she also wants the communities closest to them to benefit from the baby gear waste that is diverted. She says PSC students had the unique idea to use a single metric—based on weighted averages—that included the three closest landfills in addition to commonly used metrics, such as income and other demographics.

“You can throw out a problem, and they can bring all these insights that you weren’t expecting,” Zhao says, including pricing solutions she hadn’t considered. In turn, Zhao came to Penn for a fireside chat in the fall, speaking with PSC students about founding a company, networking, and problem-solving.

Working on carbon storage and green technologies

PSC has spent this school year working with the innovation department of New Jersey Natural Gas (NJNG), the largest subsidiary of New Jersey Resources, which also has businesses in clean energy, natural gas storage and transportation, and energy services.

Kelsey Pistilli, behind-the-meter decarbonization manager in the innovation department, says students spent the fall semester assisting NJNG’s efforts to source a home for chemicals from its carbon capture unit.

Serving as project lead from PSC was Natasha Kobelsky, a fourth-year economics major and sustainability minor from Northville, Michigan. She says that consulting entailed researching the current state of the field of carbon capture storage, assessing NJNG’s resources, and building out a framework that evaluates profitability and risk.

The connection initially came about because Kobelsky—now vice president of business development for PSC—had served last summer as a decarbonization intern in the innovation department at NJNG.

This semester, Pistilli says, PSC has worked on finding new technologies for a net-zero home that NJNG is looking to build.

At a speaker event in the fall, NJNG joined a panel to talk about the future of energy and provide career advice. “We can learn from the students; students can learn from us,” Pistilli says.

Those interested in working with Penn Sustainability Consulting can email psc.upenn@gmail.com.