The Wisconsin Center for Wildlife and the UW-Stevens Point College of Natural Resources invites you to the first seminar
in the Celebrating 50 Years of Excellence: UWSP's College of Natural Resources Seminar Series

My Journey From Waste Management to Urban Planning

Thursday, March 4, 2021
at 5:00 PM

Via Zoom! Click HERE to join the seminar!

With Shantanu Pai, Assistant Sustainability Researcher Interim Zero waste coordinator
University of Illinois

What materials we use, keep, discard, and repurpose provides insight into various aspects of the human experience. In this presentation, I engage with how my experiences at UWSP have not only allowed me to explore societies evolving relationship with these materials but also interact with the complex systems that have arisen as part of this material use. Furthermore, I discuss how these experiences now inform my explorations in the role materials management practices play in the various current imaginations of sustainable futures.



Shantanu Pai is an assistant sustainability researcher at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) and the interim zero waste coordinator for the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. At ISTC, Shantanu has managed over 30 projects providing hands-on technical assistance to citizens, businesses, institutions, and governments across the state of Illinois. Projects range from identifying individualized solutions in material management to implementing sustainable transitions that increase resilience. At the University of Illinois, he manages their waste transfer station and material recovery facility that processes over 30 tons of material daily. Shantanu received his B.S. in soil science and waste resources from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and a master’s in urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Outside of his full-time job, he is currently a Ph.D. student at the College of Urban Planning and Policy where he studies the challenges of efficiency and equity in climate adaptation and mitigation planning.