In this edition of Sustainability Decoded, Meg Baltes, Partnerships Manager at Tradewater and a McGill University sustainability graduate with experience spanning carbon markets, Scope 3 emissions strategy, and community solar, traces the unplanned route that led her from a Portland coffee shop to destroying super-pollutant gases for a living. She also consults on sustainability strategy through Net Impact.
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The cacophony of thoughts in my head must have grown just loud enough to displace the part of my brain needed to align my foot to the tread while hurrying up a flight of stairs. The thwack of my skull on the concrete was a full factory reset. In the first few seconds I could feel the little bumps and ridges of the steps as a negative imprint on the skin just above my brow, until the swelling pressed them out into a shiny red goose egg. I sat there for a moment on the landing, hand pressed to my forehead, late for an interview I had already half-decided to skip.
This was my second conversation with Tradewater, a company focused on permanently destroying super-pollutant gases—legacy refrigerants, methane leaking from orphaned oil and gas wells—gases that are quietly accelerating near-term warming while most people have never heard of them. I had barely heard of them either. But after months of rejection emails, I had started treating every application as an exercise in managing disappointment rather than a genuine pursuit. The first Tradewater interview had happened midway through senior graduation photos; I'd sprinted back to my apartment to take the call and then returned to the shoot feeling vaguely foolish, convinced nothing would come of it. I almost canceled the interview. Now I was sitting on a staircase in Portugal with a goose egg on my forehead, wondering if the universe was trying to tell me something.
I went anyway. I showed up to that second interview with concealer dabbed over a lump that concealer cannot actually hide, and I talked about carbon markets and Scope 3 emissions and refrigerant destruction with as much composure as I could assemble. When they offered me the job, I felt something I hadn't expected: not triumph, but a strange relief, like finally exhaling after holding your breath for so long you'd forgotten you were doing it. The head still hurt. I barely noticed.
What I've come to understand is that the path to that staircase was not accidental, even if it felt that way the whole time I was walking it.
It starts, improbably, at a coffee shop in downtown Portland, Maine, where I was fourteen and was trying to make some extra cash. My job was to run the register, brew coffee, make the regulars feel heard. Simple enough. But Portland's downtown was also home to a lot of people experiencing homelessness, and they spent their days nearby, some of them becoming regulars themselves, lingering near the door at the end of my shifts. What I noticed first was how much food we threw away every day: pastries that were slightly misshapen, sandwiches that had sat just a little too long. Boxes of it, every shift, into the trash. At some point I started bringing it out instead.
There was one man that would appear most days around closing time. He had a system: he knew which of us would actually talk to him, and which would pretend he wasn’t there. He had a crumpled dollar he always tried to hand over, which I always refused. What I remember most was my curiosity. Why was this food ending up in a bin when someone was standing twenty feet away who needed it? The question sounds simple. It's not. It's a systems question, and I was fourteen and didn't have the vocabulary for that yet, but something in my brain was filing it away.
Years later, in college, I would become co-president of MealCare, a McGill student organization that diverted surplus food from campus dining halls to community kitchens across Montreal. We drove vans. We logged quantities. We built relationships with kitchen staff and tried to scale what was essentially a logistics operation run on volunteer hours. By then I had the vocabulary and could talk about supply chains, food security, and resource flows. But the underlying instinct was the same one I'd developed in Portland, closing up a coffee shop at fourteen, refusing to throw away a sandwich when I could give it to someone instead.
Between Portland and Montreal, though, was a stranger education.
I spent a summer going door-to-door in Maine selling community solar, which is an experience that sounds almost comically unglamorous and turns out to be one of the most useful things I've ever done. You stand on a stranger's porch with a brochure and about five seconds before they decide you're not worth their time. You are almost always wrong about which houses will be receptive as the mansions ones sometimes slam the door immediately and the small, cluttered ones sometimes invite you in for twenty minutes. You learn to read people fast. You learn that the way you explain something matters as much as what you're explaining, and that the version of "solar energy" that lands for a retired teacher in Scarborough is completely different from the version that lands for a skeptical landlord in Portland. You fail constantly and in public, which is its own kind of education.
I was two years into my undergraduate program at McGill at the time, perpetually scared of what my major should be because I was afraid of choosing a path that would close the others off. That summer clarified something. The solar panels I was selling weren't just a product, they were an argument about how energy should work, embedded in policy decisions and financing structures and community relationships. I wanted to understand all of those layers, not just one of them. I came back and declared a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Sustainability, Science, and Society, a degree that sounds coherent in retrospect and felt genuinely chaotic to live through. In one semester I took a course on the history of religion, a soils class, and a module on spatial modeling of coral bleaching. My academic advisor occasionally looked at my transcript the way you look at someone who has assembled IKEA furniture without instructions. Impressed that it's standing, but uncertain for how long.
But the chaos was doing something.
When you study across disciplines long enough, you stop seeing them as separate and start seeing the connective tissue between them. A land use decision is also an energy decision is also a public health decision is also a political decision.
Sustainability work lives in that connective tissue, and the people who navigate it best are usually the ones who aren't too attached to any single framework.
My senior year was an experiment in controlled chaos. I was simultaneously serving as Vice President of Sustainability and Operations for the student government—a role that involved managing full-time employees, overseeing the student bar, negotiating vendor contracts, and moderating sustainability club politics during a year when the campus was, to put it diplomatically, tense—while also interning with IDEXX, a Maine-based biotech company, helping build out their three-year sustainability strategy. IDEXX meant emissions inventories and CSRD reporting frameworks and a lot of time in spreadsheets; the student government role meant an 11 p.m. call about why the bar's recycling bins were in the wrong place and a 9 a.m. meeting the next morning with an excel spreadsheet of product emission factors. Neither role was necessarily glamorous. Both were teaching me the same underlying thing: real sustainability work is mostly coordination, communication, and the management of competing priorities that nobody has the bandwidth to fully think through. It is not, as I had vaguely imagined in college, primarily a matter of having the right ideas.
What I didn't know then was that I was accumulating a kind of fluency in the texture of how large organizations actually make decisions. While this would matter enormously later, at the time it mostly felt like being very busy.
After graduation, IDEXX couldn't bring me on full-time, which I knew was coming and still stung a bit. I went back to the job search with a McGill degree, a VP title on my resume, and months of IDEXX experience and found that none of it reliably opened doors. The sustainability job market is strange because the field has expanded faster than the hiring infrastructure around it, which means a lot of roles are vaguely defined and a lot of candidates are competing for positions that may or may not reflect what the work actually is.
What eventually shifted things wasn't more applications but the conversations. I reached out to McGill alumni who had landed in sustainability roles, to people I'd met at IDEXX, to names I found through LinkedIn that seemed to be doing interesting things. Most didn't respond. Some did. And those conversations were more useful than any job listing, because they told me things that job listings can't: what skills actually matter inside these organizations, what the day-to-day looks like, which roles are growing and which are being quietly consolidated. Networking isn’t a dirty word, I wasn’t trying to put on a performance or corner people in a conference room. I was just asking people questions and listening to the answers, which turns out to be the most important professional skill that nobody puts on their resume.
None of this prepared me for Tradewater in any direct way. I knew nothing about carbon markets when I started. I had never modeled a refrigerant destruction project or explained high-GWP gases to a procurement officer at a Fortune 500 company. My first few months involved a lot of nodding while internally conducting emergency research, a lot of asking colleagues questions I was slightly embarrassed not to already know the answers to, and a lot of moments where something I'd learned in a completely different context (how to read a room, how to explain something quickly to someone who didn't ask for the explanation, how to keep moving when the situation is too complex to fully resolve) turned out to be exactly what the moment required.
The way disparate experiences braid together into something functional is hard to convey in a resume or a cover letter. A coffee shop in Portland and a solar pitch in Scarborough and a food van in Montreal and a spreadsheet in Westbrook and a staircase in Europe. Separately, these are just things that happened. Together, they're a set of instincts about how resources move through systems, how people make decisions, and how to stay useful in situations where nobody fully knows what they're doing yet.
Climate work is full of those situations. It may be mostly made of them. The people who do it well are, in my experience, less often the ones who had the most linear preparation and more often the ones who learned to be comfortable not knowing yet are curious enough to keep asking, resilient enough to keep showing up, and unbothered enough by imposter syndrome to walk into a room with a goose egg on their forehead and talk about refrigerant gases for an hour.
That's still the job. Most days, I still feel like I'm figuring it out. I think that's probably right on schedule.
—Meg