Long Beach, CA – Robert P. Stearns has retired as an employee of SCS Engineers (SCS) effective June 30, 2006. Mr. Stearns, a co-founder of SCS in 1970, has served for more than 30 years as the firm’s President and Chairman. Mr. Stearns will be retained as a consultant to continue his service as the firm’s Chairman at least through 2008, and to provide other business and technical support to the company.
Mr. Stearns’ exemplary achievements include his advancement of the practices of solid waste management, his contributions to the environmental engineering profession, and his leadership in building a notable environmental engineering practice. Under his visionary leadership SCS implemented an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in 1986, facilitating the vigorous growth of the firm from 150 employees to over 550 today.
The many innovative environmental engineering projects performed by SCS, starting in the 1970s, form the basis for many of today’s standard industry procedures for investigating and controlling landfill gas (LFG) emissions, forecasting LFG generation rates, and designing, constructing, and operating LFG extraction and migration control systems. This body of work, more than 2,800 LFG assignments since 1970, has distinguished SCS as an international leader in this field.
In 1969, Mr. Stearns was a principal investigator on an EPA-sponsored 2-year contract to study the bioreactor landfill concept at a demonstration site in California. He has applied the insights gained from that study on numerous assignments over the intervening years and this long-standing experience has led to SCS’ emergence as a present-day bioreactor landfill specialist.
Mr. Stearns also conducted a pioneering refuse collection privatization project with the City of Phoenix in the mid-1970s that resulted in a groundbreaking and still-active program that is considered a model for other cities. SCS has a built significant international solid waste privatization practice founded on Mr. Stearns’ early work in Phoenix and elsewhere, including Argentina, Albania, Sri Lanka and Egypt.
A frequent contributor to professional and trade association technical programs, Mr. Stearns has presented and published many articles addressing solid waste management and landfill gas control and recovery issues. In 2003, Mr. Stearns was inducted into the Environmental Industry Association’s prestigious Hall of Fame. In 2005, he was inducted into the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Academy by the College of Engineering at the University of Iowa.
Mr. Stearns is a Board Certified Environmental Engineer in the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and is past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Los Angeles Section. He has served as a board and committee member of the Solid Waste Association of North America and the National Solid Wastes Management Association. He has also served as Chairman, and is currently on the Board of Directors, of the Environmental Research and Education Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to improving national waste management practices.
Mr. Stearns graduated from the University of Iowa, with a BS in Civil Engineering and later earned a Masters in Engineering Management from UCLA. He is a registered professional engineer in the states of California, Virginia, and Ohio.
