Elinor W. Tretheway Elly Tretheway

We're getting married!  It's all kinds of flavors of fun and scary and exciting.  I'm told I really have very little to do with the wedding.  If you like, you can follow our plans the same way I do, on the blog.  Right now it looks like we're getting married in Sacramento over Labor Day this year.  I don't think that date is set hard and fast yet though.  I'll update things as best I can whenever I can. 

I want to find her a good job in Pittsburgh.  Anyone need a Berkeley trained engineer with five years of program development, policy, and urban planning experience?  She's top-notch!

What can I tell you about Elly?  I've finally got some pictures up, so maybe they can do the job for me.  Briefly, she is capable, competent, and caring.  She is also the single best present-buyer I've ever met, and possibly the most practical person as well.  I'm going to use this page to try to tell her stories about saving the world.  She is also very modest, so she needs someone to brag on her behalf. 

In her former job, it worked like this:

Recycle for Life (RFL) recruited local clubs, schools, churches, and citizens to collect PET plastic bottles.  Like most successful programs, they balanced appeals to aesthetics and common sense, with low-level bribery.	The bottles are taken to a central location where they are shredded and shipped off island to be melted and reused.  This solved several problems, but none perfectly.  Remember, shipping costs money.

Enter the Yam Stick.  The particular brilliance of the project Elly worked on was that it addressed several concerns at once.  Yam is a common staple consumed in the tropics.  It is a tuberous root that sends a vine up a nearby tree.  If you want big yams, you need easy to climb poles.  Such poles usually take the form of young hardwood trees.  The problem with cutting down young hardwood trees, is that they never grow into old hardwood trees.  Old hardwood trees root soil and (especially in the tropics) prevent runoff during rainfall.  Extensive yam farming leads to explosive topsoil erosion.

Elly worked to promote the use of yam sticks made from melted-down plastic bottles.  The plastic gets used, the soil gets trees to anchor it, a product is made that can potentially be sold, and everybody wins.

Now-a-days she does some great work with Menomonee Valley Partners, an environmental and economic redevelopment outfit in downtown Milwaukee. 

Disclaimer:  Hey Baby, just in case you happen to come back to this page, don't worry about how it looks now, soon it's gonna' be the best page of all of them.  Really! 

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