I am Sruthi, a sustainability and green tech professional, with an educational background in Bioprocess Engineering. Originally from the southern state of Kerala in India, I completed my Engineering Bachelors in India and moved to Germany to pursue my master’s degree at the Hamburg University of Technology. At Hamburg, I was drawn to biofuel technologies and started specializing with biofuel production technologies. It was at this time I saw an opening in Denmark at Ørsted (then called DONG Energy) to work in the same technology.

Hence in 2014 I moved to Denmark to start my dream career developing and scaling up biofuel technologies. I moved to the city of Fredericia in Jutland. It was a quiet place compared to the hustle and bustle of India or Hamburg, but slowly fell in love with the beautiful city as well as Denmark. Being a smaller city, it was easier to build deeper connections and made some good friends there who have become like family now. I am also grateful for my 4 years in Fredericia for able to have the additional time to learn Danish at an evening language school.

I started my career as a concept development engineer developing concepts for 2nd generation biofuel plants as well as working in lab developing fermentation process. But since I was in the Graduate program at Ørsted, I had the unique opportunity to try something totally different. Hence in the 2nd year of my Graduate program I transitioned into the role as a Project Engineer working on Project development and maturation of Municipal waste treatment plants with an enzyme-based technology called Renescience. Here I was exposed to scaling up technologies to production scale, customizing concepts to customers as well as procurement processes and loved seeing the concepts I developed on paper or lab scale take a life of itself in the real world. I worked extensively with internal specialists and external suppliers to improve processes and cost out projects for creating value from waste. Working on solutions that could answer the waste management problems that the world is facing today, gave me immense satisfaction.

But it was thanks to my then Manager Ningling Rao, who is also a dear mentor for me, noticed my potential with working with organizational and change management roles. With due support and guidance, I transitioned into roles to lead standardization and vision led programs.

After serving as a Product Line Manager at Renescience, I moved to Offshore Wind division at Ørsted to serve as Program Manager for the strategic sourcing program. This turned out to be a fantastic position, where I could apply principles of standardization, simplifications of processes and systems as well as work with fantastic colleagues and stakeholders across the business to reduce cost of operating offshore wind farms and thus making green energy cost effective.

While working deeply with different climate change mitigation topics at work for macro level changes, I slowly started implementing small green habits at home and in my personal life for micro level changes. I started sharing my own learning from working with green technologies, which lead to the birth of my passion project @greenbyhabit.

Through ‘Green By Habit’ I share my learnings and simplify sustainability concept, but also aim to build a non-judgmental community helping to embrace greener habits. Special thanks to my ProWoc mentor who encouraged me get ‘Green by habit’ out on a social media platform.

In 2022, I joined Chr Hansen as the Program manager for the sustainability program within sourcing, which was a perfect opportunity to combine my personal passion to simplify and make sustainability tangible with my professional skill set. In this role I am specifically working with decarbonization of our supply chains as well as implementing responsible sourcing practices.

What is your greatest achievement &/or career highlight? Why ?

I do not generally see one event as a highlight, as my career has been evolving through different pathways. Every time I felt I transitioned fully into a new role that required new capabilities, I celebrated it as an achievement.

But one thing I really appreciate looking back is the opportunity to take part in one of the high potential talent development programs at Ørsted called ‘Columbus’ and at the end of the cohort I was given the recognition as Master of relations. This was personal for me, as building genuine relationships with mutual respect is very important for me and to have that recognized was very special. Columbus also helped me to work on my strengths and pitfalls in a more conscious way and take ownership of my own development after the program.