About

Principals

Consulting Based on Experience. EPS principals, over the past 40 years, have successfully built and run both private and NGO sector businesses making our services unique in the environmental consulting arena. The firm brings to clients: from the "ground up" practical business experience, an intimate knowledge of how the environmental community operates, legal, legislative and regulatory expertise; along with firsthand experience at creating, managing and funding budgets.

Gary M. Petersen in 1972 founded and ran one of nation’s first community based commercial recycling business, ECOLO-HAUL RECYCLING INC., eventually acquired by Waste Management Inc. (WMI) in 1988; in the process becoming a WMI Vice-President of Recycling and Marketing. In that role he helped establish Recycle America across the U.S. and became its Director of Environmental Affairs. This kind of business experience included: developing and marketing innovative recycling infrastructure including: recycling centers buy-back and drop off, municipal curbside collection, designing one of the first material recovery facilities (MRF) in California, multi-family collection programs, commercial recycling programs, recycling drop off collection "bells," implementing the ,largest reverse vending machines for aluminum cans in the U.S., establishing the first municipal franchise for recycling, establishing recycling markets world-wide, managing fleets, ensuring profit margins, securing government grants and private sector financing, and dealing with both government regulations and stakeholder input and opposition. In 2005 Petersen was appointed to the California Integrated Waste Management Board (now CalRecycle) by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was also a core member of the Greening of the White House Task Force in 1994.

Robert H. Sulnick, a licensed California attorney was a tenured law professor at Loyola of Los Angeles Law School and had a successful law practice which included: the Bhopal, India (Union Carbide) gas case, and being a lead lawyer representing citizens living adjacent to the dump sites on both the Casmalia, and McColl, California toxic waste facilities .

Sulnick has established advocacy and analytical skills which he has employed in favor of the environment in: court, Sacramento, and Washington D.C. Additionally, Sulnick has developed advocacy coalitions, and strategies, in support of environmental technologies and policies in California, New Mexico, and Washington D.C for a variety of environmental causes and technologies including solar energy, wetlands preservation, re-refined oil, low-sulfur diesel, cessation of offshore drilling, alternatives to polystyrene packaging, electric cars, EV fast chargers, preservation of the Rio Grande River, Native American environmental rights, and recycling.

Sulnick, stemming from his co-founding American Oceans Campaign (AOC) with actor and environmentalist Ted Danson, has strong standing relationships within the environmental community. As CEO of AOC, Sulnick was a member of the Green Group (head of the nation’s leading environmental organizations), which worked co-operatively on such issues as: coastal pollution, ocean dumping, and wetlands preservation, preserving marine biodiversity, marine mammal protection, and double hulled tankers for oil transportation ships. Sulnick has a long standing unique relationship with oil and energy issues having been the president of No Oil Inc. (an organization which stopped Occidental Petroleum from drilling 60 to100 oil wells adjacent to the Will Rogers State Beach in Pacific Palisades, California), a lead advocate (as CEO of AOC) in stopping offshore oil drilling off both coasts of the United States, helping the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) and BP establish low-sulfur diesel fuels, and being a lead architect of California’s landmark used-oil re-refining legislation (SB 546).

He has also been involved in advocating for both the development of conversion technologies and desalination; technologies capable of converting waste to energy/fuels and responding to the need to create new drought-proof local water in drought stricken communities.

(Of Council Retired) (continuing as an Advisor to EPSE)

Christopher P. Peck, is a results-focused public affairs professional with extensive experience in energy and the environment. He has a talent for finding creative solutions to challenging problems. For more than three decades, Peck played a key role in developing and implementing California environmental programs and policy. He has created and managed statewide anti-litter, recycling, waste reduction and electronics recycling public education campaigns. He also served as a special assistant to the Secretary for Environmental Protection with responsibility for the content and timing of all State agency communications related to air quality, water quality, hazardous and solid waste, pesticide regulation and health risks related to chemicals in the environment. In 2005, the Governor appointed Peck to serve as a senior advisor to the California Integrated Waste Management Board, the State’s independent waste management and recycling agency, where he provided strategic counsel to the Board’s members.

Peck has also developed and executed public outreach strategies to support infrastructure improvements for Southern California Edison, southern California’s largest investor-owned public utility. He created and implemented public involvement strategies to support successful permitting and construction of transmission and substation projects from 66 kV to 500 kV, enhancing public education and countering activism against critical infrastructure upgrades. He coordinated public outreach for SCE’s $1.6 billion program to deploy five million smart meters to residential and business customers, along the way creating a cost-effective advertising campaign in the San Joaquin Valley that helped minimize strong public opposition anticipated due to Pacific Gas and Electric’s earlier, troubled smart meter installations in that region. While at SCE, Peck created and managed a recognition program for municipal sustainability efforts, including success metrics, peer review procedures and corporate sponsor recruitment.

Peck has also assisted businesses with environmental and disadvantaged business enterprise certification. He has advised southern California hotels on sustainability issues and assisted their certification to Green Seal’s green lodging standard (GS-33) and helped Native American-owned businesses obtain certification from the National Minority Supplier Diversity Council.