Chemical Leasing

When Fellow Jie Zhou presented her Incubator Idea at the 2012 GCC, I just had been accepted at the University of Veracruz, Mexico for a Masters in Ecological and Environmental Economics and was searching for possible topics for my thesis project. The more I learned about Chemical Leasing the more interested I became. Chemical Leasing is different because it solves the dilemma between ecological and economical interests, by creating a win-win solution.

Melton Fellow Jie Zhou brought the concept of Chemical Leasing to the Melton Foundation network with an Idea Incubator pitch at the 2012 GCC. Following this, the project went through an intensive learning and research phase to ascertain: where can it be applied, who are the specific actors, what are the incentives, how does it work?

Melton Fellow Juli Maier decided to go into deeper research on the topic, doing her Master’s thesis on it. And, to raise wider awareness of this concept, she presented her work at the 7th annual conference of the US Society for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, Burlington, USA in July 2013, for which her participation was supported by a Melton Foundation grant.

She built a collaboration with UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization), the German Consulting Agency BiPRO and the Mexican Cleaner Production Center on a Chemical Leasing case in Mexico. Her work aimed to show the ecological and environmental benefit of Chemical Leasing by analyzing and comparing the material and energy flows when Chemical Leasing is used and when it is not.