MESM 2024
Pronouns: she/her
Bio
Elizabeth Braun graduated summa cum laude in 2020 with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Certificate in Journalism from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her main interests lie in pollution and waste management, specifically how to reduce waste at all points of an item’s life cycle, from production to re-use and decomposition. Elizabeth has experience with various forms of waste management, from food waste to fast fashion. She worked as a waste sorter for events through Green Mary in Petaluma, CA, for various Green Certified kitchens in San Francisco, and volunteered with the Ventura Land Trust cleaning up trash accumulated along nearby beaches, rivers and estuaries. She currently juggles managing a busy thrift store in Ventura, CA alongside her studies at Bren. Through these experiences she’s had a first-hand view of the process of handling and repurposing waste, and the vast potential for improvement. She is pursuing the Pollution Prevention and Remediation specialization at Bren to gain a well-rounded understanding of all aspects of pollution and waste. Her goal is to create incentives for businesses and communities to handle their waste more responsibly, while taking the burden off of the shoulders of individuals to make deeply-informed choices.