Yve Torrie
Project Manager
Email: Yve Torrie
Phone Number: 978-934-3121
Fax Number: 978-934-2025
Address:
Lowell Center for Sustainable Production
University of Massachusetts Lowell
One University Avenue
Lowell, MA 01854
Biography
Yve Torrie is project manager of the Chemicals Policy and Science Initiative at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production. She manages all the Initiative’s projects, working with industry, state and federal government representatives, and non governmental organizations to achieve its objectives.
Most recently she has worked with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to develop an action plan to implement its Executive Directive to promote Green Chemistry, developed a Green Chemistry roadmap for states, worked with state agencies on chemicals policy reform efforts, researched limits of federal policies on toxic substances in consumer products, and worked with retailers to develop best practices in product chemicals management in the retail industry.
Yve graduated from Tufts University’s Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Graduate Program where she specialized in environmental health issues and interned with the Massachusetts Office of Technical Assistance for Toxics Use Reduction. She has an extensive background in program management in the non profit marketing and communication sector that was accomplished prior to her graduate studies.
Profile
Yve Torrie started at the Lowell Center in March 2006 as she was finishing her thesis on “Alternatives to Perchloroethylene” in the Dry cleaning Industry in Massachusetts," a topic she chose after much reflection on how environmental health and environmental justice issues interrelate.
The fact that minority and low income communities are disproportionately harmed by toxic emissions and hazardous waste, which are preventable, is anathema to Torrie. She views the bolstering of environmental health as a way to promote human equality within society.
Torrie specifically came to the conclusion that chemicals and toxins are the next great issue to be faced by our society now that climate change is finally being acknowledged. “We trust that chemicals are being regulated when they’re not,” she says. “We need to do something to change that.”
Such change is precisely the role of the Chemical Science and Policy Initiative of the Lowell Center as Torrie sees it. Its job, she holds, is to bring together all stakeholders including government, industry, and NGOs to communicate with each other in finding solutions to chemicals policy inadequacies, while at the same time promoting change through sustainable innovation, green chemistry and design for the environment. “Everyone must be on board,” she stresses, “and the Lowell Center is facilitating this.”
She ascribes the Lowell Center’s success in this role to the fact that it is approachable by all types of people, organizations and institutions. As such, the Lowell Center brings about communication between these important sectors of modern industrial society.
