Kim Chaffee’s sales and management consulting prowess was built over many years in the air pollution monitoring instrumentation industry. Leveraging his engineering degrees from both Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, he won millions of dollars in sales of environmental and process monitoring equipment for smokestack industries, including power, cogeneration, municipal and hazardous waste incineration, cement plants, as well as pulp and paper mills. Mr. Chaffee’s customers included Dominion Energy in Virginia, Duke Energy in North Carolina, Santee Cooper in South Carolina, and Jacksonville Electric in Florida. During his air pollution instrumentation sales management career, he sold most of the US EPA-required Continuous Emissions Monitoring Systems (CEMS) to municipal solid waste incineration plants on the east coast.
Mr. Chaffee joined the USBI Board in 2018 and is a passionate advocate for innovative strategies that scale up biochar's use to reverse climate change and environmental degradation. He has been a lead organizer for two USBI national conferences - Biochar & Bioenergy 2019 and Biochar 2018. Not only did he help attract hundreds of attendees from all over the world, but many corporate sponsors and trade show exhibitors as well.
In the 1980s, Mr. Chaffee helped Fortune 500 clients navigate the new product development process, showing them how to capitalize on their existing strengths in manufacturing, marketing, R&D, finance and supply chain relationships.
Early in his career, Mr. Chaffee’s love of the outdoors led him to be first in the travel industry to bring discounts to college students. His nationwide network of 125 ski areas drew tens of thousands of customers, while his beach vacation venture grew to be one of the largest in the country. He has also served as Harvard Club of Virginia president for six years and takes an active role in the Divest Harvard initiative.