Doug Parker, who previously led EPA’s criminal investigations division, has launched a data firm that’s using peer pressure to prod companies to get cleaner.
Parker, who spent more than two decades working at EPA on environmental enforcement, is co-founder and CEO of Ecolumix, a firm that tracks environmental and worker safety data and shows clients how they compare to their competition.
The company officially formed about five years ago but was in “stealth mode for a couple of years while we built out and did some testing,” said Parker, who left his career EPA post in 2016 to move to the private sector.
After his years tracking polluters at EPA, Parker wanted better data to keep tabs on companies’ environmental performance.
He teamed up with Paul Stey, a former EPA mathematical statistician who co-founded Ecolumix and now serves as its chief data scientist.
They sought to “take the best data available” in the United States and “provide the best kind of report cards on how companies are actually doing — their emissions, the intensity of their emissions, their compliance record, their worker safety record,” Parker said.
If the owner of a petrochemical plant in Louisiana wants to know how it’s doing versus others from an environmental, health and safety perspective, “We can tell you that,” Parker said.
Their clients include companies “who need this data, increasingly, to understand their own performance and how they’re doing in their sector, and also understand their supply chain,” Parker said. Clients range from large energy companies to retail and logistics firms.
