Sightings | Alumni Profile

The Business of Reducing Global Warming
Duke grad mixes interests in environment and entrepreneurship in new eco-capitalism venture

by Laura Ertel

Alicia Seiger lives at the intersection of entrepreneurship and the environment. She got there on a road that started at Duke University.

Seiger is vice president for corporate sales and business development for TerraPass Inc., a new eco-capitalism venture in San Francisco, Calif., that helps individuals and businesses offset their carbon dioxide emissions. She says she first became interested in the environment as a Duke undergraduate in the early 1990s.

"During my freshman year I took an environment seminar, and we read Al Gore's Earth in the Balance. That was a very formative class and book for me. There was always something ‘green' in me, but that class really illuminated ideas and issues around sustainability."

Seiger, who always had an entrepreneurial streak, designed her own curriculum at Duke, a combination of environmental science and policy and cultural anthropology. She added a study abroad program in Australia, where she explored how humans interact with their environment.

Upon graduating from Duke in 1996, Seiger hoped to find a job in the environmental arena, but her entrepreneurial interests led her to a start-up Internet marketing company. "I loved creating a business and defining a new space. But ultimately it didn't have the meaning I was looking for, or the impact on things I felt were important," she says.

So Seiger headed to the Stanford Graduate School of Business to gain some skills to help her pursue her passion. When she graduated with an MBA in 2002, another opportunity presented itself: to write case studies for Stanford's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, where she learned even more about entrepreneurship. Eventually, former colleagues lured her to Wine.com. She enjoyed it there, but she really wanted to be in a position that used her zeal for entrepreneurship to effect social change.

That opportunity came in November 2005, when she became the second employee at TerraPass (www.terrapass.com). The San Francisco-based, for-profit environmental startup gives environment-conscious individuals the opportunity to reduce their impact on global warming by funding renewable energy projects such as wind farms and methane capture. Each TerraPass member's contributions to such projects are intended to offset their "carbon footprint— the carbon dioxide created when they drive, fly, or use electricity.

TerraPass pools its members' fees and invests them in clean energy production. All of the company's offsets and sales transactions are verified by an independent auditor, the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions. Since the company sold its first TerraPass in November 2004, TerraPass registered more than 9,000 members and reduced more than 150 million pounds of CO2—the equivalent of taking roughly 17,000 cars off the road—by funding nine clean energy projects. Ultimately, the company hopes to reach one million members and offset 10 billion pounds of CO2 emissions, a leading cause of global warming.

With the small staff—it's now up to five employees—Seiger has her hands in just about everything, but her main responsibility is to develop a business channel for TerraPass and to build strategic partnerships to gain greater access to consumers.

"We have a great consumer brand and consumer product, and I'm looking at the challenge of adapting that to meet the needs of businesses."

TerraPass' enterprise services are designed to help businesses become carbonneutral through custom programs ranging from offsetting the emissions from their mobile sales force, to corporate air travel and on-site energy use.

She says, "Having a TerraPass program is a great way for companies to communicate to current and potential employees and to their customers that they care about the environment. In addition to communicating company values, some businesses also look to us to help them prepare for anticipated regulatory changes."

Seiger says the most valuable thing she learned at Duke was how to learn, think, and communicate. "I am thankful that I was able to study at such a well-regarded university as Duke, and in particular at Duke's school of the environment. The school's great reputation gives me credibility. In a for-profit environmental business, people want to know that you've cared about this issue and studied it for a period of time—and I can point to that from my years at Duke."

Seiger notes that, while there are nonprofit organizations focusing on carbon reduction and global warming, TerraPass decided to join the growing group of for-profits in this realm.

"We are certainly an experiment in eco-capitalism. And that experiment has been a fascinating and rewarding experience. We believe that you can ‘do good and do well'—that you can have a successful business with a product whose output is positive environmental impact."

And, while her road to TerraPass may have started at Duke, you can bet that Seiger has already cancelled out any carbon emissions she created along the journey.

Laura Ertel is a freelance writer based in Durham, N.C.