AIChE Chicago October Meeting

Tour Location: Tradewater (5:00 – 7:00 PM)

650 Morse Ave, Elk Grove Village, IL 60007

Meeting Location: Coach’s Corner (7:00 – 8:45 PM)

152 Biesterfield Road, Elk Grove Village, IL 6000

Biographies:

Gabe Plotkin – Founder & Strategic Advisor I am a founder of Tradewater and currently serve as Strategic Advisor. I began working in environmental project development at Wabashco, LLC, after a 12-year career as an attorney. I served first as a staff attorney with the Federal Defender Program for the Northern District of Illinois. I then joined the law firm of Miller Shakman & Beem, a commercial litigation boutique, where I became a partner and served as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Throughout my career, I have served in various leadership roles in the nonprofit world. While in law school, I founded Youth Rights Media, a non-profit in New Haven, Connecticut, dedicated to empowering youth to protect and advance their legal rights, and served on their Board of Directors for close to ten years. I also served for six years on the board of the Rebuilding Exchange, a Chicago non-profit committed to developing a market for the reuse of building materials, including spending four years as Board Chair. I hold a B.A. from Brown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Cassandra Whitford – Senior Manager, Methane Program Prior to joining Tradewater, I worked as an engineer at MSA Safety, designing combustible gas sensors used in portable safety devices to detect methane and other flammable gases. I hold a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University at Buffalo. During my time at Northwestern, I spent five years developing and testing catalysts for sustainable chemical reactions relevant to the renewable energy industry.

Victor Molina – Operations Manager I’ve previously worked operating hydroprocessing units at an R&D facility developing catalyst for numerous oil and gas companies. I served in the United States Air Force as a fuels specialist, where I operated and maintained fueling equipment. I also worked as a lab technician testing JP-8 jet fuel to ensure the quality of the fuel met specification for use in military aircrafts.

Tradewater is a mission-based company in business to prevent catastrophic climate change. We concentrate our efforts on scalable strategies to collect, control, and destroy potent greenhouse gases. Our goal is to make the biggest difference we can in the fight against climate change, and to do so as fast as we can. To date, Tradewater has collected, controlled, and destroyed halocarbons and methane equivalent to more than 6 million metric tons of CO2. The magnitude of this impact is often difficult to grasp, but it is equivalent to planting nearly 100 million trees or preventing more than 6.7 billion pounds of coal from being burned—either way, it is a massive impact. Tradewater is dedicated to increasing its impact by preventing at least 22 million tons of CO2 equivalent from being released into the atmosphere through 2027. This work matters now because it has a massive, permanent impact, and as we increase the scale of impact, it gives us all a fighting chance to prevent catastrophic climate change. https://tradewater.co